Now, George was a good straight boy to begin with,
but there was bad blood in him someway
he got into the magic bullets and
that leads straight to Devil's work
just like marywanna leads to heroin
You think you can take them bullets and leave 'em, do you?
Just save a few for your bad days.
well...

Well, now we all have those bad days when we can't hit for shit.

The more of them magics you use,
the more bad days you have without them
So it comes down to finally
all your days being bad without the bullets
It's magics or nothing.
Time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself,
kid, you're hooked, heavy as lead

And that's where old George found himself.
Out there at the crossroads.
molding the Devil's bullets.
Now a man figures it's his bullets,
so it'll hit what he wants to hit.
But it don't always work out that way

You see, some bullets is special for a single aim.
A certain stag, or a certain person
And no matter where you aim, that's where the bullet will end up.
And in the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser's wand,
and point where the bullet wants to go

I guess old George didn't rightly know what he was getting himself into,
the fit was on him and it carried him right to the crossroads.

- Tom Waits, The Black Rider

My CenturyLink DSL connection starts out slightly faster than the advertized rate, but if do any sort of sustained high bandwidth activity, it slowly gets worse and worse. So anytime I watch something on Netflix it starts out at the highest quality, and then every 5-10 minutes stops to rebuffer at a lower quality, until it hits 0.7 Mbps. This occurs regardless of whether I am watching during peak hours or not, and I've seen it with long FTP downloads as well so it is not specific to Netflix, or caused by congestion.

I haven't been able to track down whether it is caused by ISP throttling, or if my wireless router / DSL modem has issues with sustained use. I've tried doing speed tests before, during, and after the problem occurs and they always show that my connection has the full advertized speed.

If they want to revoke his grandmaster status as the original poster suggested, they ought to have some proof that he cheated in those tournaments, not just this recent one in Dubai. Otherwise a ban on future play and footnote on his grandmaster status is more appropriate.

Yeah it is really crappy that a company can lie to the credit agencies about you, destroying your credit score and there is nothing you can do about it. I mean, you can file to have the information in your credit report corrected (because those are statements of facts which would constitute libel), but they aren't required to stop including that information in your credit score (because the score is a statement of opinion) and they usually don't.

Yes, you can't tell the difference in the spectrum of the light when you are staring at the light, so when looking at objects whose color is purely emisive, like TVs and monitors then you can represent the entire gamut of color that the human eye can see by combining three primary colors.

But this breaks down when you are looking at objects that are reflecting that light, because the way those materials reflect light absolutely is wavelength specific. In that case if you have two lights that appear to be the exact same color when staring at them (or when shining them against a white wall), but have different spectra, then objects illuminated with those two lights can look very different because they absorb and reflect those spectra differently. A normal person won't be able to quantify why they look different, but they will know that something is "off" and may get an impression of the lighting in vague terms like mood or character.

So no, you can't fake a lighting spectrum with just 3 primaries, which is why producing good LED lighting has been much harder than producing good LED monitors.

For the entire history of the human race nearly all the lighting we have encountered has been block-body radiation, and a black body spectrum will always look better and more natural to us than other light spectrum. So florescent and sodium vapor will finally die off as LEDs become less expensive, but variations in color temperature will never go away. Warm lights will always feel more cozy and intimate just like campfires and candles have always been. Cool light will always feel a bit dreary, like an overcast day. And Daylight spectrum will always feel bright and cheerful. Opinions on whether a living room should be bright and cheerful or warm and comforting may vary. But unless we somehow stop experiencing natural lighting whatsoever, and evolve into Morlocks, variants of black body light will retain their historical associations.

These are really cool. But it did make me chuckle when the article talked about how current LED candelabra bulb in particular are quite ugly. The candelabra bulbs were made to (poorly) mimic the shape of candle flame, and now we are attempting to mimic that imitation because we have gotten used to the way it looks :)

If this is a case of NIH, then it is reinventing the framebuffer, not X11, Wayland or Mir. And it makes since to do so since the kms/drm interfaces provide better performance and more features than fbdev.

Yes it has been, and your following paragraphs demonstrate clearly why this is so

The problem with the current system is that the PTO has taken the approach of only rejecting patents if they can find documented evidence that someone has done the exact same thing before. If there is a single independent claim for which they can't find exact prior art in a timely manner, then they approve the patent, regardless of how similar it is to other prior art. They deliberately ignore the obviousness of the patent because they don't want to have to defend subjective decisions against appeal.

The recent Supreme Court rulings have forcefully asserted that this is not acceptable. The law clearly states that obviousness is one of the criteria for patentability and therefore the USPTO and courts must take that into consideration when deciding patentability. Furthermore, they have stated that if the improvement that an invention makes on prior art is not patentable by itself, then the invention is not patentable. This is a huge decision because it rules out a ton of "on a computer" and business model patents that combined things that weren't patentable on their own into something that was patentable in aggregate. This second issue is likely to have an even bigger impact as it can be applied more objectively than the first which increases the chances that the USPTO will embrace it. Furthermore, if anything these changes decrease the amount of research the PTO has to perform for an average application.

Agreed which is why we need these reforms. They proposed two important changes. First is to strictly limit how much information the plaintiff can subpoena during discover. This prevents fishing expeditions and prevents discovery from turning into a war of attrition, which will make defending oneself against patent claims faster and less expensive. Secondly it allows defendant to challenge the validity of the patent before discovery has taken place, potentially avoiding the vast majority of the expense of defending oneself, if the patent is determined to be invalid by the new post-Alice standards.

I have no disillusions that these changes will magically make the patent system perfect. In fact I expect the USPTO and the lower courts to continue to be slow to adopt them, but they address the two biggest issues with the patent system today - the low standards for patents and the cost of defending against them - which is more than I can say about any other proposed changes to the patent system in the last 50 years.

Apart from the loser pays part (which I dislike as well), the rest of reforms were about limiting the ability for either party to draw out the pre-trial proceedings, which wouldn't harm legitimate small plaintiffs.

Granted, the biggest problem with the patent system has been that the criteria for patentability has been so loose, and the recent Supreme Court rulings will certainly do more to fix that root cause than the recent patent reform bills. Hopefully going forward these new rulings will improve the quality of patents approved and upheld in court, which is by far the single most important reform needed in the long run.

But in the meanwhile there are more than 20 years of bad patents that have been granted, and the costs of defending against a patent lawsuit is still far greater than the cost of settling. We need to make it less expensive to challenge existing patents if we don't want them to continue to be a burden for the next 20+ years. That is exactly what the reform bills were about. They were designed to be complementary to the Supreme Court rulings, addressing a different parts of the problem.

Yeah, but the cash registers don't record anything. That eliminates all the automated tracking of your purchases which is 99% percent of the problem. It is still possible to track what you buy though manual investigation, but that would be true even without the ATM info (security camera correlated with register records, etc).

$12 is cheap for something that lasts years (with occasional use) and prevents you from going deaf at rock concerts, while still allowing you to hear the music like it was supposed to sound, instead of sounding like you are underwater. These are not audiophile pseudoscience garbage, the frequency response of the earplugs is scientifically quantifiable, and the difference in sound quality is immediately obvious to anyone who tries them, not just idiots with "golden ears" who can hear differences that don't exist. Like the AC posted, these aren't the only brand, but AFAIK they all are pretty much in the same price range until you get into custom fit professional models, at which point you are paying for comfort more than quality.

Yeah, and good earplugs like these have a nearly flat frequency response which make it easier to have a conversation in loud room, unlike foam earplugs or headphones that muffle the sound in addition to attenuating it.