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Microsoft Seeks Latitude/Longitude Patent
theodp writes "Q. What does Microsoft feel is unpatentable? A. Apparently nothing! On Thursday, the USPTO published Microsoft's patent application for the Compact text encoding of latitude/longitude coordinates, in which the software giant explains how a floating-point number can also be represented as a less-precise integer that's displayed in base-30 notation!" If ever I have seen a silly patent, this is it.
Pretty sure the US Patent Office has a say in what is and isn't patentable.
Support the First Amendment. Read at -1
Who care's what they patent? There's no chance in hell this would stand up in court, the judge would laugh it off and Microsoft's patent gets revoked.
Is there prior art? Probably.
Is it obvious?
Probably.
Is it capable of winning a course case? AAHAHAHAHAHAAHAA!!!
End of story.
Until they need to kill a competitor. Then, they go on the offense.
EVERYONE says their patents are "defensive". Just look at how many actually use them that way.
This is a problem with USPTO, not Microsoft. I mean, how is this any different from me downloading pirated movies? It's wrong, but I do it anyway because I can (get away with it). It's the same with Microsoft, they can patent pretty much everything because the problem lies with "the system". Fix the USPTO, fix the problem. Fix the distribution system for movies, fix the warez problem.
This only confirms what we have all known for a long time, Microsoft is run by a bunch of morons.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have done a pretty good job establishing and maintaining desktop and office suite dominance.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have made a pretty big warchest of cash.
For a "bunch of morons" they seem to have gone from nothing to second place in the game console market rather quickly.
For a "bunch of morons," in other words, they're pretty damned successful. The last thing you or anyone should be doing is writing them off.
The coolest voice ever.
From the patent abstract:
"Methods are disclosed for encoding latitude/longitude coordinates within a URL in a relatively compact form. The method includes converting latitude and longitude coordinates from floating-point numbers to non-negative integers."
Where are tinyurl and similar websites to claim that they have been converting URLs to relatively-compact-form, using non-negative integers and letters?
"The set deliberately omits vowels to avoid the possibility of the algorithm inadvertently generating real words that could be offensive."
Wow, that is SO "politically correct". Still it does't prevent people from constructing URLs saying fvck 0ff. It would be better if people would simply learn to respect other peoples freedom of speech.
Visit http://ringbreak.dnd.utwente.nl/~mrjb/growingbettersoftware to download your free copy of the book
Two word hint: URL encoding.
(sheesh, the arrogance displayed on Slashdot knows no bounds)
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
This type of patent is NOT about protecting their rights to an innovation. It's about restricting interoperability.
After patenting this encoding method, they can create some kind of software interface based on it, e.g. have a web application that uses this encoding in it's URLs, or an extension to Internet Explorer that uses the encoding somehow. Then if the server/extension becomes popular, they can use the patent to lock out OSS and other vendor's applications.
Location-awareness is a hot topic these days -- that probably has something to do with this particular patent.
I suspect the real reason for this is so they can control/prevent deep linking into their Terraserver (etc) geographical systems. If my website has a way of generating their coordinate URLs and linking directly to their content bypassing their front page, they could now prevent me from doing this because of this patent.
Jolyon
Please read my Canon EOS tech blog at http://www.everyothershot.com
The point of encoding lat/lons this way is to allow a compact coding in URLs.
That's useful in mobile devices, where URLs are limited. It's also useful in that now you might be able to memorize and type in your latitude/longitude, since in a higher base (30 is just an example) you can get good precision in few digits (their example is 5 characters, with 2-meter precision).
Why base 30? That's 10 digits and 26 letters, minus 6 vowels "to avoid the possibility of the algorithm inadvertently generating real words that could be offensive". Funny.
So it's useful. As far as I'm aware nobody's ever done it before, which makes it both non-obvious and novel. Those are the three tests of a patent. If you don't want to use it, keep using base 10. If you do want to use it, at least give Microsoft credit for coming up with a reasonably clever idea. As another poster pointed out, this is the type of patent MS usually uses defensively, so that nobody goes out and patents an idea they're already using in live software.
I think MS would like to see everybody memorize the lat-lon of their home as two five-digit strings, but it's not going to happen. First of all, the patent requires you to pick a precision beforehand; decimal degrees and degrees/minutes/seconds don't require that. Second, even if MS introduced a standard, they'd better release the patent for public use, or nobody will bother lest they risk being sued. Decimals are wordy, but everybody understands them and they're free.
I have one other gripe about the patent. They spend considerable time explaining how to convert a number in base 10 to a number in base N. It's not one of the claims, and it really could have been taken as given.
Well, it helps that the junk they're patenting has no actual value. I don't think Linux will be crippled by the inability to use an ISNOT operator in their BASIC compilers. :shakes head: Woodcock Washburn (the typically excellent law firm that drafted that patent application) should the hang its head in shame over that one.
I'm a patent attorney. More specifically, I'm a software patent attorney, and I truly believe that allowing patents for truly useful novel algorithms is a boon for the industry. But I feel that the quality of many software patents is an embarrassment to the field. Worse, it's an embarrassment to the patentee: it's a sign that they have no ability to evaluate the usefulness of their software - no talent to determine which pieces of their products are both new and critically important.
But the /. community should be glad about one thing: As long as Microsoft's choices of technologies to patent remain befuddled, it won't be able to tap the true, strong, monopoly-cementing power of software patents.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Patent application in its wording uses conversion to compact ASCII string.
So, you can avoid infringement of this patent by using conversion to ISO-8859-1. Or perhaps a new patent, anyone? Just leave ISO-8859-2 for me, please.
There you are, staring at me again.
Just because no-one's ever done it before doesn't mean it isn't obvious - it usually means no-one's felt the need before. If you came to me and said "Paul, we need a compact way to represent latitude and longitude in URLs, what do you suggest?" this is exactly what I would have reeled off at my desk without even needing to pause for thought, modulo the rather silly thing about leaving out vowels. I'm sure the same is true of every programmer in my workplace.
MS aren't introducing a standard, quite the reverse - they are trying to prevent people interoperating with their servers.
Xenu loves you!
Look at: http://www.tapr.org/tapr/html/Fmic-e.html
This looks quite similar: http://www.nacgeo.com/nacsite/documents/nac.asp/ ... right down to the base 30 representation.
Try it out:
http://www.travelgis.com/geocode/
The inherent value in ISNOT is that Microsoft's Basic (the defacto standard used by the vast majority of Basic programmers) supports it. With this patent, other Basic implementations will be forbidden from supporting it. Only Microsoft will be able to produce Basic interpreters that are fully compatible with Microsoft's implementation.
Just like with browsers and web pages, most developers will casually use whatever features Microsoft gives them by default. Thus, it will not be possible for Linux to reliably run Basic code developed for Microsoft platforms without somebody going through the source to manually remove all ISNOTs. This barrier to entry into the market for the most popular RAD language environment in the business world can be extremely valuable to Microsoft, and it could effectively cripple Linux-based attempts to provide a competing platform for hosting business apps written in VB.
Actually, RSA is more of a counterexample than an example of your claim. Because the inventors published a paper describing their work before filing for a patent, they could only patent the algorithm in the US. (The US allows filing patent applications up to one year after publication; most foreign countries disallow any patent applications after publication.)
This had two basic results: (1) much of the development work in employing RSA for practical purposes, particularly in open-source software, was done overseas where there were no patent constraints; and (2) given the de facto availability of competing code, RSA had little choice but to be at least somewhat accommodating.
Of course, even so there were limitations: for example, RSA eventually made their own RSAREF implementation freely available for non-commercial use in the US, but at the same time forbade the use of more efficient foreign implementations in its place (a restriction that was often honored in the breach, I suspect).
The one positive aspect that I see of the patenting of RSA goes directly counter to your assertions: because of the perverse patent situation, developers of things like key-exchange protocols were forced to make their code more modular, since they had to be able to employ different encryption methods in different countries.
I'm willing to grant that sometimes software patents can motivate innovation. It is certainly the case that making money is a major motivation for people (though not everyone) and in some cases, such as the RSA example, it is arguably true that this motivation would have been absent without patents and that the technology might not have developed as soon or as well as it did without them.
My concern is that in many cases software patents seem to have the opposite effect, as many people have argued. It seems to me that the difference is that the RSA patents deal with something very specific. That is, it isn't by any means the only kind of encryption available, so for many purposes one could avoid the patent by using a different encryption scheme. Furthermore, the need for this kind of standardized strong encryption was restricted to a relatively narrow class of software. Most programmers could go ahead without any concern for this patent because their software didn't use encryption at all. On the other hand, a patent on hash tables or binary search, for instance, would have deterred innovation because these techniques are used in all sorts of software.
It isn't clear to me whether there is a reasonable way to permit software patents in the cases in which they might be desirable and to exclude them in other cases.
You must be unfamiliar with the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 - in which the government encourages recipients of government funding to do exactly this. I don't believe that something the government encourages people do with government property can be construed as "theft."
(True, the RSA patent predates the Bayh-Dole Act, but there's no evidence of anything inappropriate in its patenting. You'll have to point to something particular in its history - and I don't believe any such backstory exists.)
It looks like you're relying on the general concept of patenting government-funded inventions. You must be unaware that the government has a hideous track record of commercializing its own technologies. Before the Bayh-Dole Act, the government retained ownership of vast and sundry technologies - which, as it happened, sat on a shelf completely unused. They had no commercial proponent, and so they were never used.
Your principle ignores the realities of business. Software is primarily a business - even the open-source kind. This is understandable; most Slashdotters know computers much better than business. Just be aware that virtually all of the software on your computer was written in a business context, and that the realities of commerce might play an important role.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
The idea of the obviousness standard is to not grant patents for things that would surely be invented anyway, as patents are intended to encourage invention and such patents would only stand in the way. Now, consider asking any nerd who han't read this slashdot article for a way to efficiently encode numbers in a URL. (S)He'll almost immediately suggest a higher base. Admittedly, the base is likely to be 32, which simplifies computation and improves efficiency rather than 30, but if you demonstrate enough confusing characters to justify 30, that solution will come up quickly as well (most likely along the lines of "find as many characters as you can; count them; use that base.") The nerd will have little need of a pause for thought. That's what obvious means.
Now if only we could get the courts to accept this standard. It would be fun watching professors re-invent patents on the stand with opposing lawyers objecting "he said 'um'! He had to think about it."
Sig:Why copyright isn't a fundamental human right
That's a relief (in this forum), though I'd encourage you to upgrade this to "often." Consider that you rarely hear about the software patents that are good and productive - they're not as newsworthy as "Amazon patents OneClick, oh no!"
It is certainly the case that making money is a major motivation for people (though not everyone)...
"Making money" has such a bad taste to it, doesn't it?
Money derived from commercial sofware doesn't go (100%) into the pockets of a greedy CEO. Much of it goes simply to pay the salaries of the programmers, and the operating costs of the business. I harbor the overly idealistic, probably naive view that professional programmers are motivated by (1) the desire to create cool sofware and (2) a deep-seated love of programming. They can only pursue those goals if they get a paycheck.
Sometimes, a patent is needed to secure the business capital to create this environment. That's where business realities, like patents, become important.
My concern is that in many cases software patents seem to have the opposite effect, as many people have argued.
I completely share your concern. Any time someone sucessfully patents an old or silly computing concept, it drags down everything.
But I attribute it to the infancy of the software patent field. People are still floundering with this new concept, what it can accomplish, how it should be used. Over time, sofware business people become more familiar with the nature of patents - and patent attorneys become more familiar with the nature of software. There will be a focusing of the field on truly useful and worthwhile software patents. Anything else - patenting ISNOT, for example - is simply a waste of everyone's time, money, and reputation.
That is, it isn't by any means the only kind of encryption available, so for many purposes one could avoid the patent by using a different encryption scheme.
Absolutely. In fact, the RSA patent encourages competing software companies to find alternative methods. Maybe those methods will be better - more secure, less computationally taxing, offering features not found in RSA, etc. - and they'll separately patent and commercialize their better algorithm. Encouraging competition and "designing-around" has always been a goal of the patent system.
It isn't clear to me whether there is a reasonable way to permit software patents in the cases in which they might be desirable and to exclude them in other cases.
Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's also pretty subjective, though. At least I can offer this: All patents - good and bad - expire 20 years after filing. That's an eternity in the software industry (though it's much less offensive than the copyright industry's "life of the author + 70-95 years" schtick), but at least it's a backstop time limit to really egregious conduct.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Nothing's perfectly compatible, but over time people work to improve interoperability at least with older features. The difference here is that nobody would be able to fix this incompatibility for the next 20 years.
Assuming they have the source. One of the current criticisms of Linux is its lower level of support for running commercial closed-source applications. This patent could end up being a barrier to running many commercial applications that happen to be written in VB.
In some cases a Linux port might not be on the vendor's priority list, but customers might wish to run the app on Linux using mono, Wine or some similar technology. However, patents like this could thwart the ability to fully emulate the Windows platform. This could effectively prevent Linux from reaching a critical mass as a platform for those apps, and it would tend to ensure that customers can never really get rid of all their Windows boxes.
It's all a very shrewd move on the part of Microsoft, but IMO patent law should be changed to somehow prevent this purely obstructionist usage of patents. Maybe mandatory RAND licensing on all patents would be a solution to the problem. At least then people could choose to pay a reasonable royalty and continue with their work instead of giving the patent holder the total ability to block out competition.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
The string encodes Lat, Lon, nature of the event and control digits to minimize errors.
Some characters are excluded, but not exactly vowels. The idea here is to prevent misreading (eg "O" (letter) and "0" (number). Or "l" (letter) and "1" (number) and so on). So the base used is not 36, but something around 30 (can't remember precisely).
Oh, I'm sure that's one of the intended uses. Companies do this all the time. A fellow patent attorney who used to do work for Kodak tells me that they patented tons of minutiae about their photo developing chemistry - solely to create a boulder of an obstacle for competitive development.
My only response is that these companies are damaging their own case by patenting such trivialities:
Microsoft says, "We have 1,000,000 patents."
Opponent responds, "Yeah, like the 'ISNOT' patent, and the 'Condensed Lat/Long' patent, and the 'Tapping on a PDA' patent.'"
It raises the inference that these patents are a whole lot of expensive drapery - that the average value of each one is quite low, and that the number of meritorious patents is only a small portion of the cited mass.
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Sorry, once more with paragraphs
So there have been 150,000-300,000 software patents granted since 1998? Or is that merely when the appeals process for the lower court ruling ended?
The problem I have with software patents, David, is that such a very small percentage of software is written for sale. Most is written for use. The USPTO seems to have no reasonable way of knowing what techniques have and have not been used by some programmer somewhere in the country. They can look at previous patents (there were none, initially), they can look at journals, but there is no viable way to prove lack of previous invention and use in someone's in-house code development. There are just too many programmers doing too much work.
With 150-300k software patents out there, with some high fraction non-novel or obvious to experts in the field, programming has become a minefield.. even things that were nominally novel due to context, like writing software to do an old function on the Internet, are being locked away, and by companies that themselves benefited tremendously due to the use of software techniques developed and shared freely before software patentability.
How does anyone but Microsoft benefit by Microsoft patenting a wide swath of approaches to reducing Spam? Microsoft gained many tens of billions of dollars of additional revenue due to the surge in PC sales brought about by the widespread adoption of the Internet, yet they and others are now putting roadblocks up as fast as they can to control any further elaboration of the Internet, or competition in providing compatible services on it.
How can this possibly be defended?
- jon
Ganymede, a GPL'ed metadirectory for UNIX
Okay, let me ask you some questions:
Let us take, for example, the latitude 36 degrees, 1 minute, 30 seconds. (Assume WGS-84 for the entire post.)
If I convert it to 36.025 degrees, is that a new projection?
If I convert it to 3.6025*10^1, is that a new projection?
If I say it in Spanish, or any other non-English language, is it a new projection?
If I write it thirty-six degrees, one minute, thirty seconds, have I made a new projection?
Now let's define a new unit, call it millidegrees. That is, one thousand millidegree = one degree.
If I write it as 36025 millidegrees, have I made a new projection?
Now let's take that number and write it in hexadecimal, 0x8CB9, is that a new projection?
None of these have made a new projection (or projection onto a plane at all), because we are taking the exact same geographic coordinate (forget about not having expressed a longitude for now, the same argument applies) in DEGREES LATITUDE.
In fact, we are still talking about spherical coordinates, are we not?
Now, let's take one of the above numbers, 36025 millidegrees, and convert that to Microsoft's base 30, and we get 1B0T millidegrees in Microsoft base 30 (the set of digits does not use vowels).
1B0T (base 30) millidegress = 36025 (base 10) millidegrees = 36.025 degrees (which is what Microsoft says the original coordinate is expressed in).
If we take both a latitude and longitude, and convert them into Microsoft's representation, then we have not made a new projection because:
(1) We have not changed the model used.
(2) We have not performed a transformation on the coordinates other than changing base. Particularly, we are still dealing with (spherical/ellipsoidal/geoidal) geographic coordinates.
(3) We have changed the scale, however, by expressing coordinates in millidegrees instead of degrees.
Since a map projection involves also doing (1) and (2) in addition to (3), which we have not done a projection. In particular, we have written geographic coordinates in degrees as geographic coordinates in millidegrees and then converted the number to base 30. This is not a projection.
Suppose you give me a map, how about the Carbury Creek Quadrangle, Oregon, Provisional Edition 1983. Now, if I cross out the scale in kilometers and draw one in in meters, and then cross out all the numbers on the map and write their base 30 (or hexadecimal, binary, or any other base) equivalents, have I changed the map projection into a new one? No, I haven't. The datum used to produce the map is still the same, and nothing I have done requires that the map be redrawn on its plane of projection. Likewise, the method described in Microsoft's patent has also not created a new projection.
Now, prove to me that they have created a new projection. (Since I have effectively disproven it.)
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
...obvious and trivial patents is way more than enough to bankrupt just about any small or medium developer out there who gets accused of a patent violation by Microsofts teams of lawyers.(or some other large concern to be fair)
It doesn't matter if it's obviously bogus on a casual review, the fact remains that they have the most money to burn, and can drag almost anyone through the "justice" system until they are quivering whimpering paupers. It wouldn't take too many public and loud examples of this nature to throw quite the chill into independent development of the overt and above board kind. This is a company that successfully fought off the US government and pretty much got away with it. Their technical legal "loss" wasn't a loss,not to them anyway, when they are allowed to print up their own "money" to use to pay the fines, and that "money" went to brainwash the next generation into still using their products. How many other folks get to do that in this justice system? The only other example I can think of readily and off hand is the music industry folks getting busted for price fixing, and then forced to distribute copies of their songs as the fine. Same deal, IP, trivially cheap to mass produce, being used as money to pay off a court fine. Sweet deal for them, and it's not a loss, and not even close to being any inducement for them to "change their tune" on anything really. From one day to the next day, business as usual..
Then there's the question and observation that a construct such as "linux" isn't really owned by anyone, except the copyright Linus owns of course for the kernel. The groupings of softwares combined make a distro, various companies and orgs of both profit and not for profit status distribute these, along with individual files or groups of files called applications. Once the patent wars begin, which they will eventually (it is still in the scouting and skirmishing phase now, along with accumulating patent-ammunition stockpiles to use then), you'll see most of those dry up, be made illegal to distribute,be forced to either pay just scads of bewildering royalty licenses because of these thousands of trivial but still legal patents, or be forced into this dubious ephemeral "underground" existence at least to the point of a similarity to what the P2P networks are enjoying now,complete with take downs, raids, lawsuits, actual loss after loss in the court system, now even affecting joe and jane small fry when they choose to do it, and increasingly they are choosing to do it.
It is quite conceivable that software patenting per se will result in just a small number of "legal" (I am only speaking inside the US for now), operating systems and application vendors in the not too far away future.
They are not accumulating all these patents as a hobby.
Incorrect. The Bayh-Dole Act is aimed at nonprofit institutions - mostly universities, but also nonprofit hospitals. Corporations are only incidental beneficiaries - a means to an end. If the government retained the rights to the technology, guess what they'd do with it? They'd license it to corporations, because the government doesn't produce commercial products.
I strongly encourage you to read up on this act. As one sign of its incredible effectiveness, both businesspeople and academic researchers widely hail it as a great move. How often does that happen?
As for encouraging "people," the government has many programs to help "people" to create companies around new technologies. Read up on the Small Business Innovation Research program, where states sponsor technology initiatives for small businesses (and only small businesses can apply for them.)
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Private entities also retain ownership of vast and sundry technologies - which, as it happens, sit on shelves completely unused.
Read up on the doctrine of patent abuse. Patentees have an obligation to use the technology they patent; if they don't, they can be forced into a compulsory licensing scheme.
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Your principle ignores the realities of business. It is not essential to have a monopoly on an invention in order to commercialize it.
Okay, I'll add one more topic to your growing go-research-this list: Check out how the pharmaceutical industry works. Academia creates thousands of concepts for new drugs every year, but only a few actually get turned into drugs. How do pharmaceutical companies choose candidates for further development? Think about it: the company must push the drug through several years of research, and then FDA approval. That costs a ton of money. Why would Merck take that chance if the moment its drug is FDA-approved, Pfizer, Eli Lilly, and Millennium can start selling the same drug?
For this reason, pharmaceutical companies solely focus on drugs that can be patented. This is an undeniable business reality.
This also has a direct line to software. Any company intent on developing a new software concept will probably choose Windows - by far, the largest software market in America - and thus faces Microsoft as a potential competitor. If the idea is good enough, Microsoft is an inevitable competitor. Now, why would any company spend $$$$$$$$ to develop a market that Microsoft can preempt without a second thought? Do you think the answer might involve software patents?
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Your principle also ignores the realities of democracy. The important factor is that the people have access to the invention which the people funded.
Yes. And "access to the invention" is exactly what patents are designed to promote. In exchange for the modest price of a fixed-term monopoly, the public enjoys the benefit of a corporation doing a ton of research, creating an invention, and disclosing the results along with the best way of using them. That seems quite fair to me - and to the framers of the Constitution.
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Commercialization is not the purpose of government research.
Oh - so we should spend our tax dollars on research that has no tangible benefit for humanity? "Commercialization" is just a concise term for "technology that people will find useful enough to buy." Hardly seems like "greedy business guys" in that context, huh?
- David Stein
Computer over. Virus = very yes.
Business was around before software. It is not unnatural for business types to try and treat IT and software like support commodities rather than real tools of the trade that actually make them the money. It sounds like the business MANN definitely has you down. Which is to be expected. The majority of the entrenched business elite is very un-tech savy and unwilling to learn. Unfortunately, they are a necessary evil. To really use your analogy technology is the high performance aircraft, but business is the factory that built it. Without business IT would still be locked away in universities and academic institutions without ever seeing the light of day. We need business, BUT business now NEEDS IT and software to run it.
There is only way this will solidify itself into the pointy heads of real business decision makers. Let every IT, telco and software worker of every walk of life walk off the job one day. Before they do that, shut down every system they control. When the world stops they will understand. Only then.
If anyone has a better way I'd be willing to hear it now. Otherwise, plan a day and campaign it. People don't know the value of something unless it's gone.
Of course this will be a severe problem if people walk out of power stations(especially nuke plants), hospitals, emergency response and military organizations. Although I'm hoping the decision maker of those institutions already know the value of their IT and software people?
Good luck.
I love base-30 systems - we have one that is about to expire, and has already caused all sorts or predictions of doom and gloom here on slashdot: The Serial Number for the Vehicle Identification Numbering system (VIN).
Of course that was created to make it harder for your local sherrif and local auto dealer from writing down the VIN as "I2FO0000" instead of "12E00000" . . . despite the reality that rolling over the VINs at the end of this decade should only be an inconvenience for the corporate executives that have the "I must start numbering everything at 1" mind-set. But getting back on topic . . .
Let's break this down:
Sigh. Nevermind. Our entire society is built upon a foundation of information sharing - the public school system. We spend 12 years forcing our children to accept and regurgitate information from a small number of sources (teachers), and to share information freely amongst themselves (recitation in class), and then to prove that they know it (tests) . . . only to turn around and slap the label "Intellectual Property" and to forbid them from doing precisely what we just spent 12 years training them to do.
Self-defeating.
Information is the INFRASTRUCTURE of technological advance. Just like roads and the electrical grid is the infrastructure of modern society. Any nation that figures this out, and acts to build its infrastructure will do precisely what the United States did between 1865 (backwater nation fighting a civil war) and 1945 (superpower) . . .
Chivalry is not dead, it's just frequently misspelt. - M. Langley