As an investor, anything that reallocates capital from lawsuits to innovation is a win for me.
As an entrepreneur, engineer and inventor (with a half-dozen issued patents), less patents means less roadblocks - and way less legal risk - when introducing new products.
Re subs, the water has to be moved out of the way (and then back again afterward). That would require an insane amount of power for anything as large as a manned submarine. I strongly suspect this is meant for torpedoes only.
Re "wing in ground", I'm pretty sure you mean "wing in ground effect". Dirt is pretty draggy, y'know.
It can get worse. It can always get worse while any of us are still left alive.
Clinton was worse than Bush I. Bush II was worse than Clinton. Obama is worse than Bush II.
I had nothing but disgust for Clinton while he was in office; in retrospect he looks like a paragon of virtue.
There is nothing preventing the situation under Obama's successor from being worse yet. (GOP or otherwise.)
It is not foredoomed, but unless the American public accepts that the status quo isn't working and starts electing different types of leaders (and not just Presidents), it will get worse.
And yes, we may then "miss the halcyon days of massive invasion of privacy, arrest without charge and Gitmo" under Obama.
"late-night get-rich-quick infomercials in which sometimes it's hard to know where to even begin trying to explain to someone why it's such an obvious scam"
Those things are like the Nigerian 419 scammers - they're deliberately obvious scams.
They want to filter out everyone with enough brains to give them trouble.
Sadly, if we get old enough, we'll ally reach that mental level.
When an apologist (in this case, spook agency spokesmen) says they are "only doing X", it is prudent to expect that they mean the broadest possible interpretation of "X".
The more so as the apologist in question has a reputation for deceit. (Or, in the case of spook agencies, considers deceit a part of their mission and raison d' etre).
Professional journalists are trained to worry about "fairness”, not truth. Reality, they are told, is socially constructed, and there is no such thing as objective truth.
Fairness means reporting “both sides” of a story even when there are 3 or 4 sides, or when it’s obvious who is lying and who isn’t.
If journalists were interested in truth, they wouldn't pretend to be impartial (they’re human, of course they have opinions of their own). Instead they'd openly admit their viewpoint and let the reader judge their arguments.
There are still countless newspapers in the US with “Republican” or “Democrat” in their title. I suspect the relatively high esteem which journalists enjoy is a legacy from the era when these newspapers were founded.
Before the rise of “professional” journalism in the middle of the 20th century, truth was assumed to exist (even if it was difficult to find), and publishers were proud to announce their political allegiance.
Re: an invention becomes inevitable given the state of the art
That's my point - most "inventions" are the result of reasonably bright and creative (but by no means exceptional) people doing the obvious thing under the circumstances.
This is why we constantly see multiple independent re-inventions of the same thing - news of the earlier "invention" takes time to trickle out to the wider community (esp. young people who aren't well connected).
So, those who haven't heard about it re-invent it themselves.
Such multiple independent "inventions" ought to be the definition of "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art", thus making any patent on such inventions invalid.
As mentioned re an earlier post, I personally recall using email prior to 1977.
But that doesn't mean Ayyadurai didn't invent email long after that.
It is quite possible, if he was 14 years old, that he hadn't heard about the many pre-existing email systems, and independently re-invented it. After all, email is a pretty obvious thing to do once you have a computer network.
Yup. I was only a kid at the time, but I still remember using bang paths to route email - at the time the user@host notation was still new and a lot of people didn't use it yet.
On the post: Analysis Suggests More Than Half Of Google & Microsoft's Patents Likely Invalid Thanks To The Supreme Court
Yup
As an investor, anything that reallocates capital from lawsuits to innovation is a win for me.
As an entrepreneur, engineer and inventor (with a half-dozen issued patents), less patents means less roadblocks - and way less legal risk - when introducing new products.
This is a big win.
On the post: The Worst Legal Advice Ever, Presented By A Clueless Blogger For An Insurance Company
Re:
http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/stupider
Now who's stupiderererest of them all?
English is what we make it.
On the post: The Worst Legal Advice Ever, Presented By A Clueless Blogger For An Insurance Company
Re:
I can't wait.
On the post: The Worst Legal Advice Ever, Presented By A Clueless Blogger For An Insurance Company
Re: "Stupider"?
Stupidity has no end. It just goes on and on. And on.
(Grammar Kommmies musht dye!)
On the post: DailyDirt: Traveling Fast Via Waterways
Umm...
Re "wing in ground", I'm pretty sure you mean "wing in ground effect". Dirt is pretty draggy, y'know.
On the post: Eric Holder Was The Worst Attorney General For The Press In A Generation: We Deserve Better
Re: How can it get worse?
Clinton was worse than Bush I.
Bush II was worse than Clinton.
Obama is worse than Bush II.
I had nothing but disgust for Clinton while he was in office; in retrospect he looks like a paragon of virtue.
There is nothing preventing the situation under Obama's successor from being worse yet. (GOP or otherwise.)
It is not foredoomed, but unless the American public accepts that the status quo isn't working and starts electing different types of leaders (and not just Presidents), it will get worse.
And yes, we may then "miss the halcyon days of massive invasion of privacy, arrest without charge and Gitmo" under Obama.
On the post: Jimi Hendrix Biopic Opens Today... Without Any Jimi Hendrix Music, Thanks To Copyright
Re: Re: Jimi who?
Without compulsory licensing, there wouldn't be any "music getting played, on radio all the time"...
On the post: Revealed: How To Get The IFPI To Issue Bogus DMCA Takedowns On Just About Anything, With No Questions Asked And No Review
Re:
On the post: Another Story Of A 'Fake' Brilliant Inventor? Is 'Scorpion Walter O'Brien' A Real Computer Security Genius?
Re: late-night get-rich-quick infomercials
They want to filter out everyone with enough brains to give them trouble.
Sadly, if we get old enough, we'll ally reach that mental level.
On the post: TSA Not Sure If It Groped Man Before Flight, Demands To Grope Him After Flight Is Over
Re: What have they done? Other than wasting tax dollars, nothing.
They have taught us to respect their authoritah.
That, I think, is the main point.
On the post: Yahoo Threatened With A Secret $250,000 Per Day Fine If It Didn't Comply With NSA PRISM Demands
Re: It’s a secret fine from a secret court. Why would it be enforced in open court?
If you're going to send police in enforce the order, those police normally need to be given a reason for what they're asked to do.
On the post: Analysis Of Volunteer's Metadata Stream Reveals His Life In Detail, Allows Passwords To Be Guessed
Re: Re: Re: misinformation?
The more so as the apologist in question has a reputation for deceit. (Or, in the case of spook agencies, considers deceit a part of their mission and raison d' etre).
On the post: Yahoo Threatened With A Secret $250,000 Per Day Fine If It Didn't Comply With NSA PRISM Demands
What if they didn't pay it?
Eventually the government would have to do something in open court in order to enforce the fine.
Wouldn't they?
On the post: Reuters Tries To Explain Away Its Refusal To Call Torture 'Torture'
Re: "physically stressful suspect incapicitation techniques."
( Ref: http://www.independent.ie/world-news/europe/tragic-malaysia-airlines-flight-mh17-hit-by-large-number -of-highenergy-objects-30573023.html )
On the post: Reuters Tries To Explain Away Its Refusal To Call Torture 'Torture'
Journalism school
Fairness means reporting “both sides” of a story even when there are 3 or 4 sides, or when it’s obvious who is lying and who isn’t.
If journalists were interested in truth, they wouldn't pretend to be impartial (they’re human, of course they have opinions of their own). Instead they'd openly admit their viewpoint and let the reader judge their arguments.
There are still countless newspapers in the US with “Republican” or “Democrat” in their title. I suspect the relatively high esteem which journalists enjoy is a legacy from the era when these newspapers were founded.
Before the rise of “professional” journalism in the middle of the 20th century, truth was assumed to exist (even if it was difficult to find), and publishers were proud to announce their political allegiance.
On the post: Huffington Post Finally Responds, Stands By Its Completely Bogus, Totally Debunked 'History Of Email' Series
Re: an invention becomes inevitable given the state of the art
This is why we constantly see multiple independent re-inventions of the same thing - news of the earlier "invention" takes time to trickle out to the wider community (esp. young people who aren't well connected).
So, those who haven't heard about it re-invent it themselves.
Such multiple independent "inventions" ought to be the definition of "obvious to a person having ordinary skill in the art", thus making any patent on such inventions invalid.
On the post: Huffington Post Finally Responds, Stands By Its Completely Bogus, Totally Debunked 'History Of Email' Series
Maybe he did invent email
But that doesn't mean Ayyadurai didn't invent email long after that.
It is quite possible, if he was 14 years old, that he hadn't heard about the many pre-existing email systems, and independently re-invented it. After all, email is a pretty obvious thing to do once you have a computer network.
I, too, invented many common & important technologies ( http://mugwumpery.com/?p=443 ).
It's just that I wasn't the first to do it.
On the post: Huffington Post Doubles Down, Has MIT Professor Spread Blatant Falsehoods About Creation Of Email
Re: Re: MIT has egg on their face
On the post: Huffington Post Doubles Down, Has MIT Professor Spread Blatant Falsehoods About Creation Of Email
On the post: Huffington Post Doubles Down, Has MIT Professor Spread Blatant Falsehoods About Creation Of Email
MIT has egg on their face
I wasn't sure, but a little Googling turned up this:
http://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V3/man/man1/mail.1
It's the Unix 'man' page for the mail program. Dated October 1972.
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