Posts by Tom 13 7544 publicly visible posts • joined 10 Jun 2009
"Obvious? You betcha. Patentable? Ditto."
Fix that and the rest will probably sort itself out. I'd concur on the earlier remarks about having different lengths of patents for different things. My strawmen are 3 years for software patents, 17 for mechanical gizmos and drugs, and a return to 75 for corporate copyrights and until death for individuals.
Even if a bigger bully comes along. The integration of IE into Windows to kill Netscape still sticks in this moderately old-timer's craw. And yes I recognize that Netscape was no more standards compliant than IE at the time. It's only one of the places where MS earned the title, others can quote their "favorites." But insisting Vista wasn't a turd pretty much blew the lid off whatever goodwill MS had left for most people. If they want to loose the title, they'll need to work even harder at losing it than they did at winning it, and it will probably take twice as long to boot.
would prefer to have the ability to synch their iTunes to their iPod rather than the other way around. In my case I hadn't read closely enough and thinking my music was backed up on my iPod, didn't have a back of my iTunes. Drive crashed, now I've got several man-day of work reconverting the music because it all came from CDs, not from their crapware store.
the apps actually were actual latent security threats, then Google did the right thing in pulling them, but badly botched the announcement. The announcement should clearly have stated they were potential security threats. Google choosing to go farther and say they were unaware of malicious intent on the part of the security researchers is optional. As a company I wouldn't get into trying to determine intentions. I would not denigrate their defenses but I also would not advocate for them either.
As for all those posters saying you ought to have complete control over the phone you bought, I'd like to collect my nickel when your phone gets compromised because of other compromised phones on the system and Google having and using a kill switch would have saved YOUR phone. Of course, I know I won't, so just STFU.
serves no useful purpose and is for research only. That doesn't mean somebody out there should have a kill switch that will remove from my system. Okay, so technically I gave up on SETI and now run it for three other programs that are probably a bit more useful, but the principle still applies.
Do Devon signed a dodgy contract with IBM that might have been okay were it not for also being hit by the US economic collapse. Now they are alleging RICO. Which I understand because RICO has lower proof requirements than just straight fraud. Although that doesn't mean RICO applies. In point of fact, based only on the info in this story, I think that part of the suit can probably be dismissed quickly and forthrightly.
If I were on the jury, I'd hope for a lengthy trial, find for Devon, and award them damages of $1.
a bot has more of a chance at successfully submitting the correct answer than an actual person does.
Personally I'd be okay with a third party registrar having my details file away and them presenting the public face for the whois registry, and the requirement that the police need to present a search warrant to get the information. I just don't see that helping the police track the bad guys. For all the trouble you'd think it would be to setup a false front for a business, lots of crooks do fairly frequently. About $400 to Chico downtown for a fake ID, setup some bank accounts, rent a cheap apartment, rent a cheap spot in a warehouse using the fake ID... The names, places and prices would change in the UK of course, but the principle would be the same. And still leaves the rest of us normal folks depending on signature based spam filters to keep some of the crap out.
A comment like that would PROVE he should be immediately removed from office on this side of the pond. You must necessarily be able to call for the emergency meeting to have a debate about the properness of their decisons.
*And a RARE pleasure it is. Mostly you guys do seem to have a better system at least vis a vie libel/slander cases. Some comments are actually beyond the pale even in political debate and ought to be actionable under libel, even for public figures. Others are certainly within the realm of debate and ought not. Unfortunately, it takes actual wise and just judges to make such a distinction. Lacking them the rules seem to move to one extreme or the other.
Science isn't democracy, it is cold hard facts. That in turn means it doesn't give a rat's ass about balance. The FACT being reported is that there is a very plausible, simpler explanation than "an incredibly complex system, of which our understanding is merely scratching the surface." That simplicity was how Einstein did away with the whole Ether theory that was then much beloved by scientists everywhere with a more than 35:1 ratio at the time.
Global warming isn't science, it's the religion of fascists intent on controlling what the rest of us do. Like the original fascism, it has a large number of allegedly unbiased idiots proclaiming adherence to it is the way forward to an improved human race.
The FCC is claiming power that has been repeatedly struck down by SCOTUS and other appellate courts since the AT&T breakup case. Either the FCC has the power to regulate ALL of the Internet, or it has no power to regulate anything. This also isn't an isolated piece despite the author's attempt to paint it as such. Furthermore he censored mention that all three of the approving members of the FCC were NOT approved by Congress, they were recess appointments by The Big 0, which makes those 74 Democrats objecting to the plan all that more important. This plan doesn't congressional support, let alone bipartisan support, and is farthest of all removed from broad based support from the American public. But that is par for the course for SF socialists.
I don't give a damn how long an advertising company is permitted to keep my information. I want opt-in so it doesn't just get handed over to them in the first place. I don't want it handed over in the first place because I know the advertising companies don't give a damn about how long the law says they are allowed to keep my info. In fact the only people who give less of a damn are the lawyers who will only be too happy to file a class action lawsuit on my behalf (one that lines their pockets and leaves me with a $5 off coupon for the advertiser's services/products).
It isn't clear from this article of the links what the nature of the forwarded email was. If 1) the forwarded email linked specifically to the defamatory posts, and 2) the initial email was itself defamatory, and 3) the forwarder made no attempts to refute the defamation, then I would hold the forwarder intended to publish defamatory remarks. On the other hand, if it was merely to the home page of a blog, I wouldn't.
"Any apparent leniency of the sentence probably reflects his actual part in the crime. Is that wrong ?"
Damn skippy there is! The enabler should get worse than the crooks that took, and the crooks that took should be paying three times what they took plus compounded interest. But that's not the end of what is wrong here. The so-called accounting department should be doing the perp-walk in front of the enabler. They're the ones who are *supposed* to be the ones watching out for the enablers and the thieves.
Bush tried to head off the loan collapse by requesting changes to loaning rules, but Barney Frank (backed up by Obama and Chris "low rate personal loans" Dodd wanted to "roll the dice some more."
Now as for the banks, it depends on exactly which ones you're talking about. Many have already repaid the Treasury, with interest. The ones who are pretty much Democrat subsidiaries, not so much. The catch is, The Big 0 hasn't put the money back into the General Fund he's kept in the TARP fund (aka The Big 0's slush fund) to loan out to "financial" institutions like GM. That's money were never going to see back again. Sort of like all the stock in the same company we now "own."
As for whether or not we can avoid total collapse, that depends pretty much on the fall elections. If conservative Republicans don't take back at least one branch of Congress, those chances will be diminishing.
The agency has publicly stated that they intentionally over-hired to insure they had enough people at the start. What hasn't so publicly been admitted is that they hired people for a week of training then laid them off. A week or so later, they hired them back again and counted both hirings as "new."
I've been fully disinvested from stocks for almost a year now and am not likely to get back in any time soon.
If so-called journalists were doing what you claim they do, newspapers wouldn't be in quite the bind they are at the moment. What the bloggers have managed to reveal is the unmitigated bias of the news media and enhance the rate of their decline. Facts DO make the newspaper, it's the editorial that gets in the way, especially the exclusion of the bits that don't fit the editorialist's zeitgeist.
And don't bother to give me the usual bs line about neutrality. I proved that point using the New York Times to a college mate (S) more than 20 years ago. Never did, never will read the rag. I told him the problem was the editorializing posing as news writing. He challenged me about not reading it. I said, okay, top right is the most important story in the paper, open it up, what do we have? Turned out to be an abortion article. Right away he wanted me to pick a different story because that was a special case. Different college mate (M) who typically didn't support my political positions said no, I hit it fair and square. Proceeded to explain how to rewrite in a more neutral stance. M agreed I successfully rewrote in a more neutral stance that did not injure either side. Having finished that I granted S's point and told him the next most important story was on the left side then under the fold right side. Did the same thing with the next story which wasn't about abortion. Did the same thing with the third. S finally gave up. It's only gotten worse since then.
Don't go into politics. It is critically important that politicians either be able to lie with a straight face and not sound like a whimpering cornered rat or be able to spew sufficient bilge so that nobody has a clue about what you meant when you spewed.
If you weren't trying to open Facebook information to World +Dog, you wouldn't have defaulted rights to the LEAST common denominator when you made changes.
that although MS has been playing in the 64-bit browser realm for longer than most, it has been playing in the sense of two 5-year olds sharing their toys (and in fact, I owe an apology to the five year olds who share their toys better than MS plays in the 64-bit space, but there was no closer comparison) than in the sense of professional sports teams competing for a championship title. 64-bit IE is so bad the default IE task bar icon links to the 32-bit version on Vista instead of the 64-bit version. Or at least it did when I bought my copy. This caused no end of confusion when trying to run the company SSL VPN connection at the time.
I think they really did lose $1.6 million. But even if the hit was only half that in these economic times not many companies will take the hit. Advertising budgets aren't actually very flexible after they've been set at budget time. I've worked next to the poor schmuck trying to sell advertising, and if he didn't catch them before the budget was set, there was pretty much no sale. Thankfully I was doing the typesetting for the articles and not working the sales desk.
at Oak Ridge is precisely the point that it will use the HYDRO power from the nearby dam. No CO2 contributions for the electric. Personally, I wouldn't care if it were near a coal powered plant or a nuke, but those tend to get the enviro-wackos panties all twisted up.
I don't expect its outputs will be any better than its inputs. Given the data isn't all that great...
but it looks like pure FUD for MS and Apple to raise the patent troll issue. H264 is as likely to be sued by patent trolls as WebM, and then everybody using H264 is just as liable as if they were using WebM. Adding their names and patent arsenals to the WebM standard would decrease the WebM liability to the trolls. So it is pure FUD.
with the Bald Eagle being the backup.
Interestingly enough, further research into the primary claim about this from the 1970s, that the accumulation of DDT caused a weakening of the egg shells, has proven that claim to be as valid as the claims the glaciers in India have disappeared.
As for the toxicity of DDT, I remember one of our Cub Scout leaders talking to us about some of his experiences in WWII. He was with one of the units that came in to help clean up the concentration camps. He said they marched the refugees through a processing line, and because of the lice and other vermin from the camp, they all got to open their shirts and drop they trousers to get doused with DDT. So I suspect the toxicity claims are highly overrated.
not enough people would have seen it for it to become a Reg story.
This is another EPIC FAIL for the new Facebook security regime. Yeah, it was out there before, but with the floodgates open to the rest of the net, it is now even easier to get in.
(who can probably actually afford well paid staff to prevent the physical access to said vehicle and the fancy gadgets to block remote access) and the one person who hits on the best bang for the pound/buck option gets largely ignored.
Spot on I say.
When I setup my FaceBook account initially because of doing a job search, there was some information I made public, some information I marked as okay for friends to see, and some information I marked for only family to see. They changed the terms of publishing that information without requesting my permission.
Sorry, Facebook has seriously fucked shit up. When I signed on you could hide information you held as critical, like oh, your date of birth. I tried to update this for my mother the other day, and guess what? Yeah, that's right, you can't anymore. I'm not sure what the hell kind of crap they are pulling with websites. My mother has barely logged onto the site a few times and it wants to link her up to half a dozen other sites. No option to decline.
I'm with Andre on this one. Even though I know the only ones who will really get anything is the lawyers, if someone wants to launch a class action suite against them for not protecting Personally Identifiable Information, I'm all in.
First up, US monopoly laws aren't based on market size, they are based on whether or not you illegally use your monopoly position in one area to extend it to another. Steve obviously has a monopoly on Iphone. He has created a market for apps on the Iphone. Now he is attempting to improperly reclaim that market by exerting the influence of his monopoly on the Iphone.
I think that both Steve and the monopoly law are asses. I wish they could both lose. So maybe I'm not so ambivalent, but I sure can't pick a winner.
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