You're saying: because something hasn't been implemented yet means it must not be obvious?

I'm saying: Perhaps M$ just got to the patent office first with an obvious idea... (much like the Bell's Telephone)

Since the patent examiners are not professionals skilled in the art It's obvious that they aren't qualified to make the non-obvious distinction, or else we wouldn't have so many of these obvious patents.

----

FYI Menus existed in 1995. Menus on a webpage == fnck!ng obvious esp. to any professional skilled in the art of making menus and web pages.

Some ideas clearly are a good match for each other. So, what if...
- an entry requirement into a DPL is a patent that the existing members in the DPL agree would be good to introduce, because it would strengthen the complete suite of patents?
- a scoring system is introduced to allow more "generous" members greater control over the direction of the DPL and a greater portion of the potential profits to the DPL itself (such as licence fees for using the patents in the DPL)?
- DPL's allowed other businesses to use the patents in return for licence fees (or for free, to protect from patent trolls)
- the original patent owner retains the right to add the patent to other DPL's

It seems that a DPL would become a business entity in it's own right.

A scoring system might be tricky to design/define, but I think doable. Different DPL's might also use different scoring systems.

I heard about this when it was first announced and cannot believe it still exists/people are still playing this "game"

Anyway this is probably more of a PR smoke then an actual discovery. Drug companies burn through lots of computer time to find potential drug targets most of which do not work. I would expect that a protein (much larger and more complicated then developed drugs) would make the likelihood of its synthesis and folding into the desired structure even less likely to work.

Well the Republicans think the opposite of the Democrats. So whenever Democrats are in control the Republicans think the end is nigh. When the Republicans are in control the Democrats expect to be treated like the Jews were in Nazi Germany.
They are both wrong/right.

They take far more than 30 seconds. The last time I went through one was probably 2 years ago at LHR. You got pulled out of the queue at random.It was optional at the time (go through it or get strip searched) It took about 3 mins but at least you got to jump the queue. Unless the technology has improved a lot then it is still going to take far too long to get everybody going through one.
Spread your legs and put your feet on the dots. raise your arms and put your hands on the yellow dots. Wait a while. Now turn around and do similar. All after you have removed any belongings from yourself.

the taste is just as bad as the smell. guts got in my mouth once when i swatted one too enthusiastically. you must be / have been in southeast asia too - the millipedes are pretty impressive, though not scary. the ~10 inch centipedes, though, are the worst. one crawled into bed with someone i used to know and sent them to the hospital. can't believe how fast and aggressive they are.

and yet, for some reason, i love it here!

If anyone from Foldit ever even met a lawyer, or uses money to pay for food, then you sign away any rights to any IP you *might* create while playing.

http://www.chenbro.com/

I'm quite sure banks are really friendly to you if you have enough money.

said the Anonymous Coward.

I pity the fool who depends on Facebook for his well-being.

> I couldn't pick out any attractive ones because their faces were all pixelated!

And? I'm into that. I gave them all 3s.

The theoretical limit of a DS1010+ and a DX510 (which is the only Synology offering in the 20 TB range) is actually 16 TB due to them using ext3. With 2 TB drives the best you can actually get are 14.5 TB with RAID-6 or RAID-5+Hotspare. Spanning a RAID-5 over all disks would result in a volume slightly larger than 16 TB, which will not work. I've tried it.
Still, 14.5 TB is pretty much okay in my book. If you actually do need more, build a Backblaze pod (same price league as two DS1010+ with a DX510 ea.; more then double the drives of that) or be spendy and get an X4500 (related as far as the number of drives goes. A completely different class in all other aspects.)

The parent post should be modded up -- I came to this comment thread specifically to mention a Drobo. I don't actually have one because I haven't needed the storage, but they've gotten stellar reviews online. They also appear to scale up relatively easily from the cheap 4-drive Drobos to the bigger 8-drive ones.

One other thing you should consider, especially with a lot of people recommending dedicated servers, is power consumption: the bigger and heavier the box, the more you're going to pay in monthly power bills. This is one reason why using an old computer that's sitting around and stuffing 6 HDs into it might not be an optimal solution: if it costs you another $10 - $15 a month in power, you can relatively quickly spend your way out of whatever savings you've nominally achieved.

That isn't "more open-minded", that is just exposure to the world. You would have gotten as much or more exposure just from working in a large city.
How many different ideas did you come across at that university? Did you have any professors who voted for Reagan, or against Clinton, or for Bush 43, or against Obama (depending on when you went to school)? There are other issues that could be used. My point is that the overwhelming majority of universities are ideologically monolithic.