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Patent Number X-1: Potash (1790)
Patent Number 1: Locomotive with good traction (1836)

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Patent Number X-1: Potash Patent Number 1: Locomotive with good traction (1836) Link

iTunes currently does not do this, but it would be a trivial change. And given Apple's propensity for starting with what they would like to appear as "kinder, gentler DRM," then turning the screws, I wouldn't be surprised to see that change come down the line--it would have the dual effect of reasurring the RIAA that their capos' music is "protected," while eliminating the ability to do things like copy RealAudio to iPods and run iTunes under Linux.

With few exceptions, a manufacturer can't require use of its parts or supplies as a condition of keeping the warranty in effect.

Right. But suppose the manufacturer says: "Go ahead and get it serviced anywhere you want; that won't void your warranty. But we won't give you the passcodes. And if you crack the passcodes, we will prosecute you using the DMCA." What then?

So, to repeat my question, how does a law regulating warranties keep the fastener guys from just not revealing the secret codes?

P.S. You doubt that the feds would take kindly to the use of technical measures to attempt an end run around Magnuson-Moss. What, if anything, have the Feds done to block StorageTek from using technical measures and the DMCA to require their customers to buy service from them? The local court has already ruled that the DMCA is valid and the third-party service thus illegal. When will the Feds step in and what will they do?

steveha

Yes. Or, in short, Jeff can not write and will never be able to. Check out his bio. College seniors who write like this don't improve. It's too late. He sounds like every MCSE our IS department has ever hired: an idiot.

...that he gets to bang Sarah Lane.

(That said, you're right about him not really being a guru.)

This web site has an excellent article/post/thing giving the background and the relationship between this game and its apparent prequel.

There is such a thing as a "submarine" patent. It happens when a party files for a patent on something that does not really exist at the time. The issuing of the patent is delayed (perhaps deliberately by the party obtaining the patent) until someone else produces or implements the covered invention. At that time the patent is finally issued. In the past, the term of a patent started once the patent was issued (not when it was filed) but now the term of a patent is from the filing date. Also, it is said that patent applications have to be published within 18 months of the filing. This makes submarine patents much less common than they once were, but they still likely exist.

The First Vienna Vegetable Orchestra

(It's real; I found 'em linked in my girlfriend's blog yesterday. Wish I could get a copy of their disc here in Canada affordably...)

-b

The interesting thing about radio and Clear Channel owning everything is that they're now realizing that it doesn't work. People are not listening to the radio anymore, and in an effort to lure listeners back, Clear Channel is cutting commerical time down. There's an interesting discussion of that, and it's rammifications here. The bottom line being that while these megacorps may own everything they can't keep shoveling crap down the consumers throats forever, otherwise the market adapts and makes them obsolete.

"[SCO is] the software vendor's version of Kim Il Jong of North Korea. The guy claims to have invented the Internet, the television, radar, automobiles, and any other technology the country has."

Actually, you're two generations behind. When I was a kid, this was a common (and justified) subject for TV stand-up comics. Long before the North Korean state (let alone Kim) even existed, the Russians claimed to have invented everything from the lightbulb, radio, television, rockets, cars, parachutes, steam engines, airplanes, neck ties, and blue jeans, to baseball, ice cream and electricity.

[btw, i think the guy's name is KJI, not KIJ.]

Let me begin by saying though that the FTC report is meaningless. It is constantly derided as "so what" because the FTC has no say in patent matters as well as the fact that it is easier to criticize than to fix. I can tell a fat person to eat less, but that doesn't really fix the problem, nor is it really an insightful comment (the FTC's comments that is).

Are we talking about the same FTC report? The FTC doesn't simply say that there are too many patents or that there is a quality problem (they mention that as well, but that's not all). They also say that economic effects and effects on competition should be taken into account when extending the scope of patentable subject matter, or in general whenever patent-related decisions are taken. They also interviewed a lot of people from the business and the field to find out what they thought (after all, the patent system is there for them, right?).

They may have no a say in patent matters, but that doesn't mean their report is non-sensical. On the contrary, I think points 6 and 10 of IPO's response to the FTC report to be completely crazy and unworldly, even though they have a lot of (indirect and direct) say in patent matters.

I completely disagree with this statement. While it sounds reasonable, I have yet to be shown anyone that acted this way. Look at Edison (1,093 patents). Look at Hammond (800 patents). These people got patents and kept innovating, often in the same areas of technology. A 20 year patent is great, but why not extend your monopoly by improving your tech and filing a patent on the improvement. *BAM* 25 year monopoly (assuming 5 years between filings). The lazy inventor is a reasonable idea, but not a realistic one.

It is used a lot by parasite companies like EOLAS (browser plug-ins), Forgent (RLE compression in JPEG), Acacia ("video streaming"), ... . They have made a whole new business model out of this idea. It would surprise me if other companies did not do this on a smaller scale.

In practice, programmers can barely understand the legalese of software patents.

This is because a) the patent is written poorly or b) the programmer is lazy. Seriously. I have written several patent applications that contain no legalese except for the language in the claims (the enabling detailed description uses all English or trade language). I have also asked programmers what they thought their previous patent applications (filed by another firm) discussed and their repsonse was "I don't know, I couldn't be bothered to read it." The ONLY reason I write claims in "claim-ese" is because certain words mean certain things in the patent world (e.g., avoid "contains" because it is exclusive).

There are many poorly written patents (yes, I have read already a lot). And the claims are also quite important, since not all programmers work in the context of a large company where they can afford a lawyer to sit next to each programmer to check when a design decision infringes on a particular claim. In fact, even large companies don't do this. Companies like IBM simply count on their huge portfolio to get a cross-licensing deal if necessary.

To summarise it as one interviewee in the FTC report said: "There is too much information and it's no longer meaningful". As far as programming is concerned, the patent database is one huge collection of ideas. A programmer in general does not have a problem coming up with ideas. Time is spent designing them into an application, implementing them and testing them.

And in case a patent is about more than some general idea, as in case of e.g. one of the mp3 patents, you end up with claims so broad they include everything but the kitchen sink. I'm still w

South Korea may not be as free as you think. A few weeks ago, I was surprised to learn (from a friend of mine who is teaching English there) that the government was blocking access to a number of web sites, including blogs hosted at Blogger (a.k.a. BlogSpot) and TypePad (a.k.a blogs.com).

The Korea Times and other news sources reported that this was done to frustrate the distribution of videos depicting the decapitation of South Korean hostage Kim Sun-il. But you hardly need to point out to Slashdot readers that blocking entire domains like that entails a lot of "collateral damage". My friend in Korea, for example, was unable to read his own blog, which consists mostly of his poems.

I submitted this as a Your Rights Online story, but it was rejected for reasons I still don't understand. This is the kind of story that I depend on Slashdot to keep me apprised of.

Bottom line: crappy patents will fall quickly if they are crappy enough, barring unclean hands on the part of the challenger.

They are mostly just bartering tokens, traded among themselves by the big companies and extorted by them from the small ones and from the mythical lone basement inventors. These large companies don't defend a patent because the patent earns them so much money, but because it gives them control over the other party. They can effectively control who can enter the market and who can't, and that's what the strategic patenting is all about.

And no, that's not just some nutty conspiracy theory of mine, it's part of FTC study on the effects of patents on innovation. And I sincerely hope you, as upcoming patent lawyer, will not dismiss this like your colleagues at IPO who bluntly state that they do "not support the FTC recommendation concerning considering potential harm to competition in deciding upon the scope of patentable subject matter" and do not "support expanding economic considerations in patent law decision making. ".

I really don't understand that stance. Patent law is a purely economical law for X sake, so why shouldn't economical effects have precedence?

"DMCA hammer comes down on tech service vendor

This just in: A district court in Boston has used the DMCA to grant a preliminary injunction against a third party service vendor who tried to fix StorageTek tape library backup systems for legitimate purchasers of the system."

http://lawgeek.typepad.com/lawgeek/2004/07/dmca_ha mmer_com.html

How much longer are we going to let them do this to us?

In this day or RDP and other remote shell/desktop applications would it still be illegal to, from your machine in the states, connect through RDP/SSH/RSH/TELNET/... into one of my machines in Canada, where we are still free to create such obviously horrific and immoral applications, and then host it on a non-US server, would said application still be illegal to create?

"They tried to scare me," Borrayo said. "They told me, 'You're a pirate!' I said, 'C'mon, guys, pirates are all at sea. I just work in a parking lot.' "

A quote from here

For those that care, Leo Laporte of Techtv(now G4Techtv) created the dial-a-song system using a linux box and perl.
Also, Leo is bringing back the show Call For Help, but only for Techtv Canada.

For those that care, Leo Laporte of Techtv(now G4Techtv) created the dial-a-song system using a linux box and perl.
Also, Leo is bringing back the show Call For Help, but only for Techtv Canada.

PrototypeProductionMan come to the ObjectFools team after successful stints at the Unemployment Office and the basement in his parents home. PrototypeProductionMan's talent is making sure that barely functional prototype mockups get rolled out into production. Exception management, security, separation of concerns between business logic and UI code, thread safety, resource management...these are all things you could say good-bye to with PrototypeProductionMan on site! With a mentality like that, it's no surprise that every production deployment ObjectFools has been involved with has turned into a completely fucking unmitigated disaster! At the end of the day, our clients should really thank PrototypeProductionMan as the reason we need to charge them a fucking arm and leg for post-rollout support and maintenance.

If the war in Iraq was truly about liberation, then any number of other sovereign states should've had priority.

Like...? I don't recall this ever being the sole purpose in going to Iraq.

If the war in Iraq was about "weapons of mass destruction", then we would've found some by now.

(1) There is a lot of sand in Iraq, which means a lot of hiding places. If you have ever lost anything in something as small as a beach, imagine the scale involved with a "beach" that is 167,924 square miles. (2) Saddam was not above "hiding" weapons (of any sort) in cemetaries and hospitals, so the number of places that one could expect to find anything pretty-much jumped to every square inch of the region. (3) Fox News and an ABC affiliate report on the fact that the United Nations found missile engines and other parts that were suited for the purpose of making WMDs in a scrap heap in Jordan. The source of all this metal? IRAQ.

If the war in Iraq was about "ties to al-qaeda", then we should've hit the Saudis first, 15 of the 19 highjackers on 9-11 were Saudis.

That's flawed reasoning. One should not condemn a nation based on the nationality of a criminal. Acting on a nation based on the actions of its Head of State is something quite different.

If the war was waged simply to procure cheap oil, then companies such as Haliburton would be clocking obscene profits in Iraq right now...

No, we'd be doing something to shut the mouths of people against drilling in the protected lands within the US. I agree that we should protect the land, so that environmental damage is minimized as much as possible, so don't think for a second that I'm in favor of drilling. By the same token, when the entire world is quite capable of watching the corporate goings-on (especially with regard to oil), I would hope that companies (like Haliburton) have the smarts to avoid doing something so blatently stupid. We all know, however, that not everyone thinks things through before acting...

Having said all this, I think that Moore has every right to think what he wants to think, and to make films based on these if that's how he wants to spend his time, even if it means people paying him for his extremist views. HOWEVER, for a pompous self-rightous man like him to put something like "Fahrenheit 9/11" in the same realm as a documentary when it offers absolutely no counter point is foolish and irrisponsible.

At least one person who should know agrees(*). If Moore was really so anxious about telling the truth (as he wants us to believe), I would like to see his take on the military prowress of Kerry, especially as it relates to Iraq.

* Link to http://slate.msn.com/id/2102723/ doesn't seem to work through the preview...

Here is a funny (if not silly and a little immature) piece on all the stupid open source assholes that don't know how to program but will be happy to start a licensing war with any of the real programmers.

Leo Laporte has a question and answer call-in show that he archives at the blog for the radio show. The downloads can be found at the bottom of the show notes.

There are blogs I read regularly, and they are in some ways similar to slashdot. The blog points out things of interest, and sometimes allow comments.

Some interetsting Blogs: Seth Godin's Blog

Poor and Stupid

Marginal Revolution

EconLog

Leo was probably one of the most tech savy folks on TechTV. He also seems to be the only regular that really embraced Linux...

For those that don't know, there's been a lot of discussion about the cancelation of CFH on Leo Laporte's forums. Here's the link to Leo's Comments.

Basically, Leo is still doing his 90 second segments on TSS, but he is working on some new projects...one of these will be Leoville.TV...he says that he is going to be getting some of the old TechTV folks to work with him. He also says that there are offers coming in from other channels, but he probably won't be back on TV on a regular basis until some time in the Fall.

Until then, there's always his radio show on KFI...

You've got it wrong. It's actually Area 51-A.

His book can be purchased on paper, or downloaded free (he has literally put his money where his mouth is). I was about halfway through the electronic version when I decided to support it by buying the hardcopy (which is easier to read anyway).

I strongly recommend this to anyone. Buy it. Read it. Tell other people about it. And mention it in the first post on a digital rights story on /.

I'm sorry, that was supposed to read:

The Screen Savers had a small demonstartion on this. Keven Rose was able to get it working aswell, but it was extremely slow.

The Screen Savers had a small demonstartion on this. Keven Rose was able to get it , but it was extremely slow.

AFAI understand, the main reason why there's a lot of bitching going on against the MT authors is that they were using their loyal users to beta-test their new MT release (3.0) while keeping them under the mistaken impression it was going to remain free. I quote from one blog:

No business ethics problems? How about this.

You ready a beta release of a piece of software, and ask people to beta test it. Mention nothing about paying, or even that you are considering changing the license. Being the loyal folks they are, lots say "OK" and you give them the software. They upgrade to it, and there's no way to downgrade.

Then, about 5 weeks later, you say, "Oh, by the way, most of you will have to pay to upgrade out of beta". Keeping in mind that most of the people who are the most loyal to MT, and therefore the most likely to have signed up for the beta program, are the ones who take MT to its' limits by using multiple blogs for things like link sidebars, book reviews, photoblogs, etc., and a lot of them no longer qualify for the free version because of the three blog limit.

You've just stranded a whole bunch of people on a beta version of your software, and you're basically extorting them to allow them to upgrade to a non-beta release.

It does look like SixApart have shot themselves in the foot and alienated themselves from their fanbase. They have violated the golden role of starting to charge for something that was previously free. In the world of tech where everyone wants the latest and greatest (and MT users are particularly tech-savvy given the requirements to install and maintain the software), this was always going to be an unpopular decision. How could they not have foreseen this?

The launch of their TypePad service last year (which is basically a fully commercial, hosted MT package with bells and whistles like photo gallery management) was a smart business move; make a service out of your product, and keep the original product free. This latest move, though, is beyond comprehension and will only hurt them. It will sure be interesting to see how they backpedal from this.

That said, it's obvious to anyone with a pair of brain celss that this pricing structure is to make their Typepad service more attractive for casual bloggers and non-techies. If you you're willing to get your elbows dirty you can run a blog on your own machine from home with the free version.

Leo really knows his stuff. I think this is best demonstrated on his "Tech Guy" radio show on KFI in Los Angeles. He also has MP3s of the older shows available in the 'Show Notes' section of his Website. Highly recommended.

Are you sure you are still watching it? Leo Laporte ended his gig as regular host in late March (as reported on Slashdot) and he left TechTV altogether in early April.

except everything was worked out with the parent company and he was back on TV by April 20th.

Mike

Leo is the only reason I watch the Screensavers

Recent report of Torture in German Prisons. It was reported that masked prison guards, in groups of three or four, struck prisoners with their fists and with nightsticks. Some of the victims suffered serious injuries and broken bones.

Leo left and then came back. Any publicity is good publicity, right?

Some industry people agree with you. This is from Scott Millers (3DRealms) blog. See especially point 2.

Compared to Europe, the Asian territories (specifically, Japan) are more challenging for selling Western games. There are three high barriers for us to overcome to be successful over there:

1) aesthetics - you've probably noticed a predilection for cuter anime style characters in Japanese games. Namely, there's a preference for characters to have slightly larger heads and larger eyes, and for environments to use a high contrast color palette. This is out of sync with the more realistic style that most of us Western game designers employ. Crash Bandicoot is one of the best selling U.S. developed games ever because they designed their characters from the ground up to be compatible with Japan.

The disconnect we have with Asian-style aesthetics is only going to be exacerbated as the average age of US gamers (currently 28 years-old) continues to increase. As adults we're obviously going to want more realistic and less cartoony games.

2) camera - games that have fast moving cameras severely limit their audience in Asian nations because people there have a tendency to get dizzy or sick from jerky movement. First person shooters are almost impossible, and 3rd person action games with simplistic follow-cams are just as bad. I remember a specific instance when working at a development company in Yokohama where I was playing a game of Descent and my Japanese co-workers had to avert their eyes from my screen because they were getting nauseous!

Games like Ratchet and Clank 1 & 2 are huge in Japan partially because their camera spin speed is very slow, and they use smart, well dampened algorithms to avoid jerkiness. This was intentional because these guys were thinking about the Japanese market from day one.

3) difficulty - games that are too difficult or punish the player too often have trouble in Japan too. People tend to get lost in complex 3D space, so I remember reading a post mortem on Sly Cooper (I think) where they said that they added lots of infomration sign posts, arrows, and clues to help guide Japanese players through their levels.

You might be interested in this guy. He is doing a page-per-page review of left behind. Started last year, has managed it to get to pg. 45 up to now. Absolutely hilarious, witty and theologically well founded. I never got past page 30 of Left Behind myself, but I'm closely following this review.

1. Enable a person to be elected president even though he didn't win the majority of the votes.

Nitpicking, but that in itself is not bad. Nor is it enabled by the Electoral College.

Direct voting would still allow a non-majority to win, in a scenario like: Bush 49%, Gore 48%, Nader 1%, others 2%)

4. Electorial college makes it easy to commit voter fraud.

Not really. Even if it was direct voting, there'd still probably be hierarchical counting at the level of each state. In some ways, EC might actually make it easier to detect cheaters.

You have skipped the single largest problem of EC: the disenfranchisement of voters in non-swing states. Voters in FL or NH are most powerful, one vote has around an 0.05% chance of tipping the statewide result. MA and UT are the least powerful states, since they have strong biases towards Dem or Repub. But other states are biased too- overall, 30 states vote in predictable ways, leaving only 20 that are truely in play during a campaign.

The additional power CA gets from Super-Electorial status is largely cancelled because it's non-swing. In a very real way, Bush voters in California don't matter: because no matter if he wins 5% or 45%, he'll still get 0 of the 55 electoral votes.

Democrats in TX and UT and Republicans in CA and MA are both harmed by the swing-state pheomenon of the Electoral College. The only result their votes can possibly achieve is bragging rights about winning "the popular vote", not change who actually gets the White House.

Patent examiners are not usually attorneys -- they are often engineers, biologists, and chemists.

Patently Obvious

is to realize that offshoring isn't done for the sake of offshoring. Offshoring -- and all the other labor practices that we don't like -- is done to not create additional full-time jobs in America. And avoiding that is done for exactly one reason: the absurd and unpredictable costs of health insurance.

The relative costs of insurance, worker's comp, etc, as part of a low- to middle-wage worker are way high. Of course a large company is going to do anything they can to avoid hiring more people.

Fix that, and the rest will follow. (Famous last words.)

read this link please . and then decide

No one has looked into /why/ pacman was so popular...

No one? Try reading Scott Miller's The Genius of Pac Man

There has been no formal study of games beyond their technical specifications.

No formal study, perhaps, but there have been several important game designers who have a lot to say on games beyond the technical specs (in fact, just about every book on Game Design -- about 8 have been published in the last two years alone -- only give lip service to technical specifications). Chris Crawford, in particular, has pretty much made a career giving lectures throughout the world on this very subject. You can read some of it here, or read his books.

His game design book actually went into the psychology of creativity, and he even had a chapter that listed the books he suggested to open your mind and give you enough of a creative background to draw from (including history books, myths, a book on "how things work", etc.)

There's a lot of discussion out here on the internet involving the non-technical aspects of game design, and if you know the right places to look, even amongst established game developers. They might not qualify as formal studies, but I'd give more weight on their analyses than "formal studies" anyway. Besides, if you want formal studies on what works in video games, start researching psychology, particularly behaviorism. There's a wealth of information in that field alone which would help game design tremendously.

Writing your own home-grown app is a function of how hard and how expensive it is to do. With pretty simply WYSWYG tools like Dreamweaver that has good support for making data-driven apps, anyone willing to take a week to learn can do it. But if research projects underway on allowing "programming for dummies" tools hits the mainstream -- Clay's observations will really come true. If you can use a combination of natural language, and drawing information diagrams with icons, then literally anyone can write applications. They won't be pretty - but they'll probably be good enough for home-grown 10 user applications. TechPolicy

You could be thinking of This is Broken. I think it's funny and not anal, but maybe I've been hanging out around usability experts to much.

Btw, today's entry is hilarious.

And don't forget the pony!

"Bad Astronomer"

Is this another future Mac OS project, much like their famous Butt-Head Astronomer project.

Come to think of it, Bevis is a constellation.

Q: What will a typical programming day look like?

A: The merged network will be the nation's premier 24/7 television network all about video games, technology and the gamer lifestyle. The G4 programming day will showcase many existing G4 and TechTV series such as G4's ICONS; PULSE; JUDGMENT DAY; PLAYERS, and CHEAT! as well as TechTV's ANIME UNLEASHED; X-PLAY; SCREEN SAVERS; FRESH GEAR; and ROBOT WARS.G4 will also premiere new original programming which will be announced at a later date.

A low credit score can mean many things.

It may mean that you are an unreliable and irresponsible person and therefore the unelected-yet-very-powerful credit reporting agencies have determined that you are not to be trusted with loans of large sums of money.

It's far more likely, though, that it means you simply don't have large sums of money at your disposal, and therefore the almighty CRAs are simply noting that you would not have the means to repay such loans.

The former is a matter of character. The latter is a matter of circumstance. Credit scores are not designed to distinguish between the two, yet increasingly they are being used as though they were solely a measure of character...

Part of what's going on here seems to be what Alfred North Whitehead called the "fallacy of misplaced concreteness." Your credit score is just that -- a score, a number, a measurable quantity. If you present people with a precise enough figure, based on complicated and precise calculations, they think that you're offering something with the kind of mathematical, empirical-law-of-nature authority that physicists used to claim. ... To a certain kind of person -- the kind of person who is intimidated by the authority of math and science, but doesn't really understand them -- the quantitative data provided by a credit score seems rock solid.

"The problem, experts say, is that many factors that can affect a credit report have nothing to with an individual's character. "It's going to reflect things like divorce, sickness, loss of one's job, possibly even identity theft ... so as a measure of conscientiousness or attention to detail, it's not very good," says Jerry Palmer, a professor of industrial and organizational psychology at Eastern Kentucky University in Richmond.

Dr. Palmer should know. Recent research he conducted with colleague Laura Koppes tested whether there is any correlation between employees' credit reports and job performance. Though the study was limited to one industry - financial services - the answer they got was a resounding "no." "

Lemelson is the guy who claimed to have a patent on the bar-code, despite having precisely nothing to do with the invention of it. Back in 1946 or so he filed a patent 'machine vision' which basically claimed the idea of having a camera watch a manufacturing line. He then submarined it for 30 odd years and when bar codes appeared he filed a continuation in part claiming them on the grounds, well that the USPTO would let him.

There is plenty about his scam on the web I found this with 5 minutes googling. Typical of the judgement is ""Mr. Lemelson systematically extended the pendency of his applications by sitting on his rights, and sequentially filing one application at a time so that he could maintain copendency while waiting for viable commercial systems to be designed and marketed,". It is hard to think of a way the patents were not invalidated.

The MIT-Lemelson prize for invention is awarded anually. The idea is to burnish his unlamented memory and try to make it look like Lemelson invented stuff. In fact he made a huge pile of money from the bogus bar code patent when a group of manufacturers paid him over a billion dollars.