Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Bold Patent Move
theodp writes "On Thursday, the USPTO disclosed that Microsoft has a patent pending for displaying numbers in a box to make them stand out. " Check out the images to see the power of this breakthrough patent. That's almost impossible to do without patents.
Now, whether Microsoft (or anyone) should be allowed to patent such thing... I don't know.
I'm sorry, but I looked at the patent application and I just don't get it. Can someone explain?
01000110 01110101 01100011 01101011 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101 00101100 00100000 01001001 00100111 01101101 00100000 01110101 01110011 01101001 01101110 01100111 00100000 01000010 01001111 01001100 01000100 00100000 01101110 01110101 01101101 01100010 01100101 01110010 01110011 00100001 00100000 01101101 01110101 01101000 01100001 01101000 01100001 01101000 01100001
"Simplify, simplify, simplify!" Thoreau
Couldn't even copy-paste the text right. Here, I'll help ya out:
"A method and apparatus are provided for visually emphasizing all of the numerical data contained in an electronic document."
Sheesh!
I'm sure they are working on a patent that covers the process of applying for a patent.
In vim, just type :set hls and then : /[0-9]\+
This will highlight all numeric data. Navigate those using 'n' or 'p'. You can also type the same stuff in less.
The sooner we patent the building blocks of life, the sooner we own life. This is the ownership society, so lets own stuff!
BY TYPING IT IN ALL CAPS
Slashdotting a US Gov't website? Some pent up anger people?
Shouldn't the link text be Microsoft has a patent pending for displaying numbers in a box?
Not trying to be a grammar nazi, but there's a whole friggin' word missing there...
Maybe they got tired of re-inventing the wheel?
Wouldn't the context highlighting capabilites of, say, Emacs, Joe, and countless others be considererd prior art? It couldn't be that hard to created An Emacs Major Mode that did this, if there isn't one already. I don't see anything worthy of a fresh patent here. That it's MS doing it is irrelevant.
You are not the customer.
One of the inventors is named -
Thiti Wang-Aryattawanich
I'd just like to know his nickname, is all...
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Quote from the topic:
"displaying in a box to make them stand out. ""
Display what in a box? I'm guessing numbers looking at the other posts but I can't reach the linked text.
- -- Truth addict for life.
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
So, there's no new art on a tag like the one below?
<div style="border:1px black;">12<em>34</em>56</div>
When someone puts images under a heading called 'Images', you expect it to contain images, not a plug-in that Firefox is unable to install.
I am sorry, but I think the USPTO is committing a crime greater than that of Microsoft by disallowing me to read patents (government-supported service) on a modern Linux system.
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
Highliting (or otherwise bringing attention to) data (numeric or otherwise) has been done since the old DOS days, and probably before. This certainly isn't new, and isn't unique by a stretch of the imagination.
Of course, by filing the patent, they want it to seem that Microsoft is the originator if this technique. If the rules the USPTO seems to apply to software patents were applied to 'real world' patents, you'd see the whole lot of them thrown out on their asses, and the whole office revised from the janitor on up to the chief.
Steve's Computer Service, Hobbs, NM
Serveral patents exist for this already.
defensive patents are ridiculously stupid
Patents are supposed to give you the right to exclusively use, market, sell, ignore, etc your invention.
This is not a ball game and you shouldn't require a defensive strategy. The patent system is seriously broken.
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
I am now dumber for the effort.
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/business/236360_appl epatent12.html
it was filed *after* the relevant technology was released by someone else...
-- it's ridiculous how many people misspell ridiculous... (damn, damn, damn...)
go, go lefty!! -4 for today, woot!
Okay, whoever wrote the headline, I think you owe Microsoft an apology. This is a major breakthrough! Not only does their new magical machine check to see whether it's supposed to emphasize numbers, it also then emphasizes them:
Emphasizing may include adding a highlighting attribute to the located numerical data or adding other formatting to visually distinguish the numerical data from the remainder of the electronic document.
Now say you're sorry or you don't get any ice cream.
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
Yeah, we all understand the concept of defensive patents. We just don't agree with it.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Has anyone come up with a patent for bringing down a website by posting a link to it on another website and counting on thousands and thousands of people to click through, thus generating high but perfectly legal traffic?
If not, I'm filling out my forms right now, and someone around here's gonna owe me a lot of money.
-- The reason it's called the right wing? Irony.
to explain 'bold'
Good old patent lawyers, paid by the word.
Open Source Drum Kit, LPLC deve board - mjhdesigns.com
Microsoft has a patent pending for displaying in a box to make them stand out
To make who stand out? Microsoft?
Secession is the right of all sentient beings.
I wish Slashdot would put a "Fuck Microsoft" button on the comment submittal page - it would save sooo much time for all of us.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I guess I'm not surprised though. Things are getting really competitive for MS right now, with Apple, Google, Yahoo, Linux, etc. If things start really going south for this company, however, expect to see all of those dumb MS patents get pushed upon other companies.
It's pretty obvious, since MS started this patent craze after being sued over ridiculous overbroad patents, that they are just doing things like this to cover their butt. They've NEVER sued anyone over a patent. I highly doubt they ever will unless it's a blatent and public rebellion or something...
I would think that prior art would be defense enough. But I guess not.
Why did we things so convoluted that we need to have interpreters for the rules?
There is no such thing as a defensive patent. A patent is a patent. Period.
What plugin do I need to view the images?
sigaar
With all the brouhaha about simpleminded patent examiners and useless patents being granted, I'm wondering if it isn't all deliberate?
If after a few stupid examples a number of patent examiners have gotten it into their heads to sabotage the whole process by granting increasingly more moronic patents? All being done in hopes of getting the whole process fixed...
are we in the middle of some sort of patent war...??
Queue the line of idiots who don't understand the meaning of a defensive patent... now!
No. Queue the line of idiots who has forgotten just how mean and nasty Microsoft has played in the past.
Anyone that thinks Microsoft is only filing 1000's of patents for "defensive" purposes and will never use them to squash competing companies or technologies is an idiot or has severe Alzheimer's!
guess they've never heard of Prior Art or Chutzpa.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I mean the stuff that you can patent now is getting really ridiculous and you know who gets hurt? The small guy? Microsoft can make a million patents and then ride off the tithes from them, and an independant person will have to dodge through a mine field of patents to make a product.
I'm all for the Office of Patents, which was an idea to show who was the first with the idea, granted there's some flaws, (Bell is created with created the phone while there's a good amount of evidence where he's not the originator)
But the original idea was for people to get credit for their ideas, and be able to own them.
However The Corporate world we live in today, has made patenting a game almost. You can patent any abstract idea, and even if your version completely fails and you couldn't program for crap, you can sue anyone else who succeeds at your worthless attempt even if it takes them 10 years, because you own the patent?
I think we need to revise the patent system to at least show that head way is made or such and if the system never gets implemented, the patent is worthless.
They're only extending the search to include all numbers and words representing numbers. Essentially instead of searching for just one word, number, or collection of symbols, they're searching for a whole bunch at the same time and emphasizing the results.
Essentially we get a preprogrammed search to pick out anything that might represent numerical data. I'm certain that something similar to this has been done before in exactness or in a very similar manner. I don't know of many programs that currently support the ability to search as broadly as this (i.e. pick out nouns, verbs, numbers, Names, etc. rather than just one number, word, collection of symbols) especially in terms of word processors and the like. Why not just patent the idea to search and emphasise certain types of symbols (i.e. numbers, Names, places, whatever else) rather than just going after this more specialized case of numbers?
Of course this brings us to wonder, should such an idea outlined above even be patentable? I really don't care much at this point, but it would be a useful feature to see in word processors and other things like this in the future. It would probably be better if it weren't just in one word processor though.
So why is it that we never get headlines like "stupid patent rejected" on Slashdot? Do all these "inventions" get the patent granted or what?
Patents, like gasoline are just something kids two generations from now will be talking about in history class.
The end is near! Front row tickets still available!
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
http://66.249.93.104/search?q=cache:jOa4kVFUd4oJ:w ww.threegutrecords.com/+three&hl=en
;)
(random google hit page)
Interpreters for the rules are called lawyers, and they've been around since the beginning of the legal system. It's not just patent law that is this complex. A simple but effective legal system which could be understood by the common person is a nice idea, but would not actually work for many reasons.
Patentfetcher.com's neat service let me grab this: http://free.patentfetcher.com/GetPatentPDF.php?f=A pps/US/2005/01/77/USApp20050177789.pdf (PDF Warning)
(Disclaimer, I don't work for them/with them, but it's an interesting service anyway).
Why is Slashdot so obsessed with Microsoft?
So, I there's this revolutionary idea: we call it language. It allows one to serialize a concept into "words" using a "grammar" to tie them together into meaning. Unfortunately, the writeup doesn't seem to take this into consideration. I see all these words, but they make no sense. I read the damn writeup here three or four times, assuming I missed the noun referred to by "make them stand out". I gave up. Then I read the last sentence and wondered "That's 'That's'" referring to? I know we grouse and moan about bad grammar her, but come on. That writeup doesn't even make sense.
lorem ipsum, dolor sit amet
+----------+
| Amazing! |
+----------+
[Insert pithy quote here]
I've just patented using letters to form words.
...we slashdotted the U.S. Patent Office, booyah! Is the linked page failing to load for anyone else?
I am NaN
Not sure why they are patenting something as trivial as an underline or box around text. So if this goes through mabey they will patent something else like Papers inside the box of software products or the english language perhaps. Just wondering if I understand what is going on :\ .
...they are patenting a process which scans files for both numeral and written out in any language numbers and high-lighting them. Why in the hell is this even necessary?
I dunno, maybe it's a big computer company or something.
It would probably be at least this easy to set up vi highlighting like this, and that would allow the highlighting to actually be a dynamic part of display of the numbers, and not part of the document itself. Just make a list of keywords -- there's really not even that many words to put in the list: Zero, One through Twenty, Thirty, Forty, Fity, Sixty, Seventy, Eighty, Ninety, Hundred, Thousand, Million, Billion, Trillion, etc.
The whole thing could handle pretty much any number you need to deal with includuing decimals and negative numbers with forty keywords. This is a lame and useless patent.
It's pretty obvious, since MS started this patent craze after being sued over ridiculous overbroad patents
Microsoft has not been sued nearly enuff for all of the hateful,lieing (fraudulent), time-consuming products that they have produced the last 20 years.
They've NEVER sued anyone over a patent.
Then where's the beef?!
SHOW US PROOF OF THIS!!
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Q:What do you call Batman & Robin after they get hit by a car? >
A:Flatman & Ribbon!
Kill all the fucking lawyers
"...Microsoft has a patent pending for displaying in a box to make them stand out. "
David Blaine can claim prior on this one. He displayed himself in a box to himself stand out already.
insert inflammatory anti-microsoft comment here
If a patent application is deemed "frivolous" or determined to be a land grab, no only should the patent not be granted, but the company applying should be forced to pay a fine for attempting to stifle innovation.
Also, any patent examiner who grants a patent that is later deemed frivolous should be dismissed, and barred from government service or activities that interact with the Patent Office.
This ain't what Ben Franklin had in mind.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Because it is soooo Innovative!
why should i prove the non existence of something to you? I think you need to proce the existence of it to me....
And i think it's pretty obvious you're an MS basher. MS is just a business doing business and in case you hadn't noticed, they've been working round the clock on cleaning up their act. If you want to bash something, bash the low quality code found in 95% of open source applications.
And if you want to bash Windows security, set a band of hackers, the size of the ones going after windows, after linux instead, and i'd bet tons of money Linux prolly has more holes in it than Windows. It's just a smaller target...
I'm no Microsoft lover or anything, i'm just sick of the brainless MS bashing by people who couldn't care less about facts vs blathering opinion. MS is not evil... linux is not perfect. Stop being a robot for a change...
Not just this patent, but all the other BS patents that are floating out there just make me want to move to some remote island so I can code in peace.
That is not a number
IANAL but this is my understanding:
Since this is just a publication, it is still being reviewed. If you are certain you know of prior art, you can send references to it to MS, which is then supposed to tell the patent office. Or you could try notifying the patent office (but more likely you'll just irritate them). If MS knows of prior art, because you told them or whatever, and they still pursue the patent, well, they are risking big trouble.
Oh well
:)
Few bugs with this implementation however. :/
Yeah, so I'm going to hell. Still, someone had to do it.
Note to self: Never sign any public petition for fear of being stalked by creepy people on the net or their friends with access to Google.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
From the patent, filed in 04!
"[0004] Unlike text strings, numerical information is more difficult to locate using the typical "find" function provided by current word processing application programs. Users are able to locate a text search string in a document using a typical "find" function because they have a preconceived knowledge of the string that they are looking for. For example, if a user is looking for the name "John" in a document, the user can easily modify the search string to match the desired string through a relatively small number of iterations. However, if a user is searching for a number that they do not already know, a telephone number for instance, it may be very difficult to locate the number in the document. The user may be forced to scan through the entire document until the desired number can be located. This can be very time consuming and frustrating for a computer user, especially if the document is a long one. "
I've got some bad news and some good news.
The bad news is that the USPTO granted Microsoft assanine patent.
The good news is that we slashdotted the USPTO (and I just saved a bundle on my car insurance)
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
1. Is not especially innovative.
2. Even a mediocre programmer could do fairly quickly.
From the meat of the application:
In order to provide the functionality described herein, the word processing application program 10 may operate in conjunction with a numeric search plug-in dynamically linked library ("DLL"). As will be described in greater detail below, the numeric search plug-in DLL 26 integrates with the word processing application program 10 and provides functionality for emphasizing all of the numerical data within an electronic document 28. The numeric search plug-in DLL 26 also provides functionality for de-emphasizing all of the numerical data within an electronic document 28. To provide these functions, the numeric search plug-in DLL 26 utilizes a program code for breaking sentences into words. Once the sentences have been broken into words, the numeric search plug-in DLL 26 compares the words to the contents of the numeric search table 28 to determine if numerical data is contained in the document. The numeric search table 28 identifies to the numeric search plug-in DLL 26 all of the numerical data that should be located in each of the supported languages. Additional details regarding the structure and operation of the numeric search plug-in DLL 26, including the structure of the numeric search table 28 are provided below.
The highlighting is incidental; the essential innovation they are attempting to patent is the programmatic identification of numeric data in tokenized strings of non-numeric characters. A multi-lingual lookup table of numeric representations.
Eureka!
illegitimii non ingravare
Try this link:& PageNum=1&IDKey=22759C01BC02&ImgFormat=tif
http://aiw2.uspto.gov/.DImg?Docid=us20050177789ki
Sure, this is something no-one has done before, and in some friggin way someone will dream up some use for this.
But what on earth gives anyone the right to reserve any stupid "thing you can do" for him/herself. How is "I though of that first so you owe me money" fair to the human race?!? How is this beneficial to society? Somehow this stupidity should be stopped!
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
I could create a script to do this in php in about ten minutes, so while their solution m be protected by copyright, it's too trivial for a patent.
Countless programs will highlight anything I ask, and most leave the original document unaffected. The only new idea is highlighting an entire category of "numerical values," rather than just numbers. This is a painfully obvious idea, not in need of protection.
Only the fact that it's not particularly useful has prevented this exact tool from being written
+--------+
|dozens| of times.
+--------+
Changa hates change.
"A method and apparatus are provided by which all your base are belong to us."
I guess this qualifies !!!
$text =~ s/(\d+)/\1/og;
Someone patent a "Method and apparatus for visually emphasizing that they are assholes, within an electronic document"!
Actually, you might not. According to the patent, one of the major features of the software is the ability to remove the highlighting.
OK, so what if I enclose all numbers in DIV tags, setting the class on each to "number"? That's something that you might well want to do (i.e. fairly bloody obvious), and then it's possible to toggle borders using one line of CSS. Come on, we have an entire style system devoted to handling this sort of change!
For the love of God, please learn to spell "ridiculous"!!!
Machines)used something called "Dynamic Windows" which was later further developed as CLIM (the "Common Lisp Interface Manager"). Among the various features of that system was the ability to annotate output with its datatype. e.g., and I'll simplify notation here for presentational clarity (and to save me looking it up) but it's substantially like this:
(with-output-as-presentation (stream 'integerThis would cause the user to see the string "a bit more than five" but the system to have backing store information (kind of like the HREF that underlies a URL presentation in a browser, except that's really more imperative in nature rather than declarative) that says that if the user clicks on that, he's really clicking on 5.3 instead.
What was interesting about the way Genera did it was that there was a conceptual relationship between "presentation" (the analog of printing output) and "accepting" (the analog of reading input). If someone later did:
(accept 'integerthen the mouse would become aware of all the occurrences of things that had been presented as integers (or even things that could be coerced to integers). The system could be further abstracted so that if you output British Pounds and someone asked for input of American Dollars, translators ran so that when you clicked on the value in pounds, it got translated at input time to the appropriate representation (presumably the translator you wrote knew how to acceess the currency exchange to do this). Output in inches could be converted to feet or meters, of course, without such network appliances.
But the key feature which seems to have been "obvious" even decades ago when Symbolics did this work was the idea of highlighting data of various kinds with boxes. In that case, it wasn't even limited to numeric data. It could be any kind of data, even things of different types that were hierachically presented (such a filename listing being sensitive on its whole line as a file, but as only part of the line for this and that date mentioned in the listing).
And it didn't get patented then, which to my understanding of patent law means it's missed its chance...
The really sad thing is that so few people know about this I/O paradigm, which had some very cool features. And then such sadness is compounded when others come along and attempt to say they dreamt up the idea.
I mean, geez, people have been drawing boxes around in paper for a long time. I don't doubt there's some implementation of a kids' book that has a piece of cellophane you can pull back and forth to highlight something. I recall things that use red over red text to make the text "become invisible" being implemented in physical books when I was a kid. That's a form of emphasis through boxes, too!
The patent office is way overboard these days. I think software copyright serves a critical purpose, but I think software patents are an abomination. I'd like to see the software patent system overhauled completely.
Kent M Pitman
Philosopher, Technologist, Writer
It's "Delores" (Long story).
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Do read the application, it's interesting. Here's an extract:
Unlike text strings, numerical information is more difficult to locate using the typical "find" function provided by current word processing application programs. Users are able to locate a text search string in a document using a typical "find" function because they have a preconceived knowledge of the string that they are looking for. For example, if a user is looking for the name "John" in a document, the user can easily modify the search string to match the desired string through a relatively small number of iterations. However, if a user is searching for a number that they do not already know, a telephone number for instance, it may be very difficult to locate the number in the document. The user may be forced to scan through the entire document until the desired number can be located. This can be very time consuming and frustrating for a computer user, especially if the document is a long one.
This is, of course, absolutely true. It's true of the find function in MS Word, and also the Find function in Firefox on Linux which I'm using right now. The idea of improving the Find function in these programs so that you can, for example, find all the phone numbers or all the email addresses or whatever is a useful one.
BUT.... we all know that you can do that using regular expressions. So I can search for [0-9]* or .*@.* or whatever. All of the regular Unix tools that we use (less, emacs, grep, etc. etc. etc.) do this. OK, it takes a little while to learn the basics of regular expressions. Maybe someone could invent an easier-to-use regular expression syntax. Maybe someone could write a regular expression "wizzard". Maybe they already have. I don't think it's unreasonable to expect users to invest just a bit of effort to learning something that they will find useful for many years.
So what this Microsoft patent is doing is letting MS users catch up just a little bit towards what Unix has had for three decades or so. Another example: last weekend my father spent an entire evening manually doing for i in *; mv $i small_$i; done in a directory full of photos. They'll be patenting ways of making that easier next. But we've been able to do it in two secs for decades.
But there's something to look out for here. Note that on the whole it's only Unix tools that have been around for a while that do regexps. Firefox, OpenOffice etc. don't have them, because these applications are bringing a Windows-like environment to Linux. I don't want that. Yes, I like GUI apps. But I don't want dumbed-down GUI apps that are just clones of what MS does, warts and all.
If we want to win over Windows users to the benefits of Unix, we should start by showing them things like "Look! I can find all the numbers in this document by typing [0-9]*" or "Look! I can rename all of the files in this directory, and so could you if you read 20 pages of this book." We don't want to try to impress them by showing them OpenOffice.
implementations that this is a ridiculous waste of money (some lawyer was paid for this!) and time.
Somebody should be ashamed of himself!
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
That would be Chutzpah.
Wait a second... Yiddish spelling Nazi?!?!?!
/[0-9]+/
Microsoft to patent the chair to keyboard interface.
"Omnis tuus capsa sunt inesse nos"
4. The method of claim 3, wherein the numerical data may be expressed in any of a plurality of natural languages.
At least binary and hex are still safe!
If I understand patent law correctly, you could get around this by letting the user search for all numbers in a certain range. For example, the user could search for all the numbers between 10 and 100. When the user did this, they would This seems like a more useful feature to me anyway.
... locating all of the numerical data contained within the electronic document". I think implementing my idea would not violate the patent since it will not highlight all of the numbers in the patent, but IANAL.
The first claim is "A method for
--JeffAMcGee
Microsoft files thousands of patents every year. They have their own patent examiners (!). Every patent is designed to be a land mine for anyone else trying to get in their face. This is probably not even close to the worst of all their patents, even if you only look at recent ones. So why pick on this particular one?
01001101 01101111 01100100 00100000 01110000 01100001 01110010 01100101 01101110 01110100 00100000 01110101 01110000 00100001
At least they have discovered something:
One shortcoming of current word processing applications programs in particular is exposed when a user attempts to locate numerical information in a text document utilizing a standard "find" function.
This I noticed 20 years ago, but apparently Microsoft has now noticed it as well.
Free tip: Many Unix text editors had powerful features for searching complicated patterns even before "current word processing applications programs" were even developed. So, instead of filing yet another stupid patent, you could set a team to work and implement a decent regexp search and replace.
Flamebait.
too much coffee for you
That's "Gotham".
Assume I was drunk when I posted this.
From the novel: AUTUMN RANGERS:
The alarm interrupted the Geeks game of Quake and brought
Tucker running into the control room from his office.
Its Rangers signature attack,± Geek1 said. Hes scrambling
it, but its him.± Geek1 was what everyone called him.
Impossible,± Tucker said. Rangers dead.±
Its him.± APRIL said. Hes alive.±
In a Cold War weapons lab a mile deep in Doom Mountain,
Tucker Johnsons frown was bathed in APRILs soft blue glow. He
looked at her through double-pained, bullet-proof glass. Her biosilicon
computers had grown to fill four seven-foot racks, networked with
billions of nano-fiberoptics she herself had designed. Somebody had
just hacked into her deeper soul.
As the CEO of Silicon Virtue, Tucker presided over a team of
master Geeks at the bridge and an army of slave Geeks manning
cubicles on a vast floor behind them. Behind them sat the legions of
patent lawyers patenting any and every aspect of APRIL that might or
might not be, using the random patent-claims generator software APRIL
invented to bolster patent production. Tucker would outsource their
jobs to India and Asia soon enough, but they needed to get off the
runway asap to close the next round of venture funding. Silicon Virtue,
founded upon the APRIL (Artistic Psyche-Robotics Interface)
technology invented by Ranger, was seven months old. They had to
hack or reverse-engineer the source code to her deeper soul, or thered
be no IPO.
We could Open Source APRIL and get the hacker community
to reverse-engineer her.± Tucker said. Would that speed it up?±
Definitely. We should Open Source APRIL.± Geek1 said.
Such knowledge needs to be shared. Shes based on natural algorithms
which are discovered rather than invent±
But then we wouldnt own her.± Tucker backtracked. Lets
try to hack her a few more months on our ownkeep on patenting
heras long as the patents pass the examiners in DC, shes patentable.±
6 E L L I O T M c G U C K E N
But its not rightyou cant±
What do you think Geek2?± Tucker asked.
Keep APRIL closed and proprietary.± Geek2 said. Patent the
hell out of her. Its our time, money, superior expertise, and±
But Ranger invented the basicswed just be fencing off his
mountaintop. And plus we cant compete with a world of hackers±
Hackers cant compete with a world of patent lawyers,±
Tucker joked.
Something this big is meant to be Open Source,± Geek1 said.
Shared like the laws of physics. Ranger wouldve±
Open Source cant be trusted.± Geek2 interrupted. It wont
scale for an enterprise system like APRIL±
We cant be trusted.± Geek1 said. APRILs power will be
immense. If we±
Well you two figure it outwrite it up for Fridays meeting.±
Tucker would always say and head out to play golf.
APRIL had grown since Ranger last saw her at MIT, before his
advisor Dr. Kervian forgot± to renew Rangers fellowship, and they
reactivated him to fly the F/A-22 Raptor on its first live missions.
Ranger was a Top Gun. Uncle Sam had granted him leave to pursue a
Ph.D. developing the F/A-22 Raptor Radar. But once in the lab, it was
hard to concentrate on Dr. Kervians projects, as radar, retinas, physics,
poetry, and AI all bled into one. It was a myth of the small mind that
physics and engineering and poetry different fields, that one could truly
know one without knowing them all, that one could enjoy a symphony
without hearing by just counting the notes. And soon Ranger got to
thinking about Beatrices soul. Was there a chance of bringing it back?
And so he lost himself in MITs heaven of well-funded labs,
free to follow his passions in the good company of fearless gradstudents,
with a soldering iron in one hand and a lab book in the other,
pioneering the western frontier of knowledge. But no heaven on earth
lasts for more than a second, and Uncle Sam
Thank you for pointing out that the interpreters for the legal system are indeed called "Lawyers". Acceptable answers would have also been Barristers, Attorneys or Solicitors.
And the reason that plain-english laws are not written is because we keep electing ambulance-chasers to government.
How about this then?
Marezy doats and dozey dotes an' liddle lamsy divey, a kiddly divey doo wooden shoe!
owa tagu siam.
These seem pretty simple to me. Whetehr or not it is simple and easy to read is subject to interpretation and opinion.
"It's pretty obvious, since MS started this patent craze after being sued over ridiculous overbroad patents, that they are just doing things like this to cover their butt. They've NEVER sued anyone over a patent. I highly doubt they ever will unless it's a blatent and public rebellion or something..."
Pay no attention to the giant army massing on your border...
The patent arsenal that MS is creating is both a defensive and an offensive one. MS is merciless in court. Heck, they sued a guy named Mike Rowe who had a site called MikeRoweSoft claiming it was confusingly similar to Microsoft. They'll sue anybody. A giant patent arsenal is just going to make them more aggressive--thinking otherwise is either naive or disingenuous.
I'll be able to open Word, open a document, click on "Edit" then on "Find" and type in "3", set the type to "numerical" (vs text) and it will match (and highlight) "three", "3", "III", and so on.
Random Patent Claims Generator from Autumn Rangers
http://autumnrangersnovel.com/
As the CEO of Silicon Virtue, Tucker presided over a team of
master Geeks at the bridge and an army of slave Geeks manning
cubicles on a vast floor behind them. Behind them sat the legions of
patent lawyers patenting any and every aspect of APRIL that might or
might not be, using the random patent-claims generator software APRIL
invented to bolster patent production. Tucker would outsource their
jobs to India and Asia soon enough, but they needed to get off the
runway asap to close the next round of venture funding. Silicon Virtue,
founded upon the APRIL (Artistic Psyche-Robotics Interface)
technology invented by Ranger, was seven months old. They had to
hack or reverse-engineer the source code to her deeper soul, or there'd
be no IPO.
"We could Open Source APRIL and get the hacker community
to reverse-engineer her." Tucker said. "Would that speed it up?"
"Definitely. We should Open Source APRIL." Geek1 said.
"Such knowledge needs to be shared. She's based on natural algorithms
which are discovered rather than invent--"
"But then we wouldn't own her." Tucker backtracked. "Let's
try to hack her a few more months on our own--keep on patenting
her--as long as the patents pass the examiners in DC, she's patentable."
6 E L L I O T M c G U C K E N
"But it's not right--you can't--"
"What do you think Geek2?" Tucker asked.
"Keep APRIL closed and proprietary." Geek2 said. "Patent the
hell out of her. It's our time, money, superior expertise, and--"
"But Ranger invented the basics--we'd just be fencing off his
mountaintop. And plus we can't compete with a world of hackers--"
"Hackers can't compete with a world of patent lawyers,"
Tucker joked.
"Something this big is meant to be Open Source," Geek1 said.
"Shared like the laws of physics. Ranger would've--"
"Open Source can't be trusted." Geek2 interrupted. "It won't
scale for an enterprise system like APRIL--"
"We can't be trusted." Geek1 said. "APRIL's power will be
immense. If we--"
"Well you two figure it out--write it up for Friday's meeting."
Tucker would always say and head out to play golf.
APRIL had grown since Ranger last saw her at MIT, before his
advisor Dr. Kervian "forgot" to renew Ranger's fellowship, and they
reactivated him to fly the F/A-22 Raptor on its first live missions.
Ranger was a Top Gun. Uncle Sam had granted him leave to pursue a
Ph.D. developing the F/A-22 Raptor Radar. But once in the lab, it was
hard to concentrate on Dr. Kervian's projects, as radar, retinas, physics,
poetry, and AI all bled into one. It was a myth of the small mind that
physics and engineering and poetry different fields, that one could truly
know one without knowing them all, that one could enjoy a symphony
without hearing by just counting the notes. And soon Ranger got to
thinking about Beatrice's soul. Was there a chance of bringing it back?
And so he lost himself in MIT's heaven of well-funded labs,
free to follow his passions in the good company of fearless gradstudents,
with a soldering iron in one hand and a lab book in the other,
pioneering the western frontier of knowledge. But no heaven on earth
lasts for more than a second, and Uncle Sam called him on home to
serve. Uncle Sam invested millions into each Top Gun, and thus they
were only granted leave in rare circumstances--Dr. Kervian had
sponsored Ranger's leave, as Dr. Kervian made his living off of brilliant
grad students, and as Ranger had actually flown the Raptor, who better
to help design the radar? On the way out the door at MIT, Ranger
hacked the system and gave himself a Ph.D.--it could come in handy, if
ever he needed something to write on. And Kervian wouldn't
complain--the more Ph.D.'s a professor produced, the more funds they
got to hire more slaves.
APRIL enjoyed building herself, designi
i agree with most of your anti-MS rhetoric.
but fsck you for being racist.
Yet another concept developers/software innovators have to avoid or ask Microsofts permission!. I can see that the concept is a good one and how useful it will be, but for it to be patentable or least patentable for profit is absurd. Is it so different from de/emphasizing Peoples Names, Date's of Birth(Covered by patent?), Countries and such like or even IP Addresses(Covered by patent)!. All of those are viable concepts to be implemented by a computer process, a computing system, or as an article of manufacture such as a computer program product or computer readable media!.
+----------+
| 99 | bottles of beer on the wall...
+----------+
Hey, Windows users, there is no such thing as "forward" slash, there is only slash and backslash.
And put an end to this sorry crap by suing the USPTO for infringement.
Interesting in that it seems to poach along the same lines as Google's startlingly stupid patent for highlighting search terms in cached document. Likely a competitive move to force cross-licensing if there is an issue.
That is fucking beautiful, man.
I agree. Although, it sounds heartless, the best thing that could happen to this country (and perhaps the world) is for M$ to be put out of business (and the patent office to be reworked from the top down I'm sure, few would feel *any* ill effects (other than employees and consultants). Instead, good technical people would be spared suffering from these bullshit patents and the world would get better tech. products.
The USPTO.GOV site/interface has got to be the worst thing ever made. The Quicktime doesn't render properly, and it's horribly broken from UI perspective.
Ugh.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
there must be One Thousand questionable patents filed every day in the USA now. By 2015 that number will be multiplied by pi to Three Thousand One Hundred and Forty One per day. When will this insanity stop?
He didn't want to infringe the patent. :)
The filesystem is the package manager
Well they've already used the word Word as a word for their word processor.
I guess they had to come up with Excel because they couldn't call it Spread or Sheet.
You've all heard of a product called MS 'Money'. Ok now they're getting really self-referential...
They are trying to patent a subset of the functionality of searching by regular expression. Just read Section 4 of the Backgroud of the Invention:
Unlike text strings, numerical information is more difficult to locate using the typical "find" function provided by current word processing application programs. Users are able to locate a text search string in a document using a typical "find" function because they have a preconceived knowledge of the string that they are looking for. For example, if a user is looking for the name "John" in a document, the user can easily modify the search string to match the desired string through a relatively small number of iterations. However, if a user is searching for a number that they do not already know, a telephone number for instance, it may be very difficult to locate the number in the document. The user may be forced to scan through the entire document until the desired number can be located. This can be very time consuming and frustrating for a computer user, especially if the document is a long one.
Microsoft hired some people who don't know how to use regexp and are homebrewing their own solution and trying to patent it!! So if someone makes a predefined expression to search for all telephone numbers in a doc and put's the results in a box, it's patent infringement. Outstanding!
This is what happens when you work in your own little world but you have and abuse the power to affect everyone elses. You show your ass.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
n/m
It's not perfect, but works without having to even restart the browser.
awesome. it matches eleventyone!
But not Eleventeen, sadly.
This makes perfect sense if you consider that the state religion of the United States is nihilism.
Once a goal is proposed (in this case, the goal is "nothing", since it is implicit, and doesn't need to be defended or explained), any methods can be used to achieve it.
Its all the same in the end.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
The invention generally relates to the field of electronic document processing and, more specifically, to the field of visually emphasizing numerical data contained within an electronic document.
I'm clearly in the wrong field.
- The fact that the numeric data test can be
expressed as a regular expression implies
obviousness (and that expression having
been described by a slashdot
reader within the first fifteen minutes
of posting); and
- The fact that run-time (re-)configurable
highlighting has a long history (I point
to syntax highlighting in your favorite
programming editor; I know that at least
for nedit it can be turned on/off
by a click)
implies to me that this is a combination of obviousness and prior art, hence should not be patentable."My opinions are my own, and I've got *lots* of them!"
--------------
| 201404527 |
--------------
Uh oh!
OddManIn: A Game of guns and game theory.
How is this not simply syntax highlighting applied to the English language?!?
www.wavefront-av.com
Sun holds the patent on that one.
I think the patent office ought to be able to reject a patent "with force," (or some such) meaning that the patent application was deemed a waste of the patent office's time. The penalty should be that the next patent that they submit and which is reviewed and granted will not be granted to the submitter, but to the U.S. citizens.
This would help to ensure that only substantial patent submissions were made, as making one bad blunder of submitting a crap patent request would mean the next time you actually had a good idea, it would be taken from you.
on the application need to be sent back to where they came from.
Both are current products even if they don't get much shelf space or press attention.
A previous post mentioned suits against Microsoft over patents. This got me thinking.
Often, when a lot of people sue a company over the same problem, they join together in a class action suit. What would be the effect on Microsoft if 10,000 people filed individual suits simultaneously against Microsoft instead? Kind of a corporate DOS attack.
IANAL. But you already knew that.
Just wunderin, cause I only want to highlight the right one.
Storm
Now, whether Microsoft (or anyone) should be allowed to patent such thing... I don't know.
No, no they shouldn't!
*So now you know...* =X
A community-oriented lyrics site
Microsoft may not be evil, but I do feel the need to point out that Microsoft's idea of "default" security permissions is an accident waiting to happen.
Face it. 95% of Windows users haven't got a clue how to secure their Windows box. I'm not going to argue that Windows hasn't come a *long* way since its early versions, and I'm not going to argue that it's impossible to lock down a Windows box to be as secure as any Unix/Linux box you can throw into the fray. You probably know as well as I do that it's entirely possible to harden a Windows machine against most kinds of intrusion.
The problem, however, is that this security is *not* the default setting. By default in Windows XP, users run with root permissions. When you enable a user as an administrator, Windows does not pop up a warning saying "you dummy, this could open you up to some serious security threats like spybots, worms, and malicious code". It just does it and assumes that the user knows what they're doing. That's a mistake when 95% of the users haven't got a clue about computer security.
Sure, there probably are security holes in OSS. But it's open source. *ANYBODY* who wants to can download the source code and do a security audit. They can fix the holes and publish the fixes if they like, or they can take advantage of it for nefarious purposes. Really, they can do whatever they want with the knowledge, though most people publish it. But as long as the user isn't running with root permissions, the kernel will not allow them to write anywhere outside of their home directory.
See, that's the main reason I like Linux: you could probably write a virus or malicious app for Linux, and you could probably dupe *somebody* into running it. But even if you manage to get somebody to run the virus, the worst that will happen is that they'll need to recreate their userid and homedir. The system itself will not come down, because the virus is still being run in userspace.
Couple that with ActiveX, which is a great way to distribute executable code to computers without the user knowing about it, and Microsoft's interesting take on standards (just look at IE), and it's easy to see why people think of MS as evil. I don't see them as evil, I just think that even though they're working on it, they aren't going to be able to fix their security problems until they reexamine their user/admin model, and that they aren't going to ever do that, because they're convinced that it's more user friendly to allow the user to install software without logging in as a special user. It's that very requirement, however, that convinces me that my Linux boxen are stabler and more secure.
As to the original topic, I just want to point out to you that in the realm of software and intellectual property, the past is not an indicator of the future. Just because MS hasn't ever sued anybody doesn't mean that they don't intend to. I can't tell you what the future will bring, and so with MS holding patents such as this I simply have to take it on good faith that they won't sue me for it. That doesn't mean, however, that I shouldn't try to do anything about it to prevent them from getting asinine patents such as this; in fact, it means that I *should* do everything I can to prevent them from ever having that kind of power.
If you believe everything you read, you'd better not read. - Japanese proverb
Not to defend MS but the problem isn't that they apply for these patents but that they can and that they have to.
Apple's case against MS defined the legal benchmark by which you could protect any new features in an OS and by extension, I think, in an application.
Companies, especially public companies, now know that the only way to defend themselves against litigation, especially in the US, is to establish patents covering features. Even if those patents are utterly bogus.
MS might also be in a position where they could be held legally responsible by their shareholders for not trying their upmost to defend the companies work via patents.
Its stupid that companies can get these sorts of non-trivial patents but don't complain about MS or other companies that do this. Complain about the legal precedents and the patent system that allows it.
/. broke the USPO's images! :-(
Lemme guess, there's a long description of a general purpose computer in the application? Sorry, I haven't plowed through the entire application. Yet. Oh, wait! There it is. It's Figure 1 in the application. Dang! Now, I'll bet, we're all infringing. How many of us aren't using this apparatus?
Actually, I was hoping this was merely some BS about putting ``numbers in a box'' to which I could respond: What! You mean "\framebox{3.14...}" isn't good enough! Unfortunately, I can't read this application without my mind, let alone my eyes, glazing over so who knows whether there's an OSS application that could be infringing on this patent. It does appear to be something more than just that, though. The bad thing is, from what I've read so far, it appears that I could be found to be stealing Microsft's valuable IP if I were to get clever some evening and code up some Emacs macro to perform a find and replace operation on numeric strings/phrases wrapping the located text in one of those \framebox directives. Something tells me that LyX already does this.
Just another example of how the US patent process is totally screwed up. There's times when I think a company like Microsoft is applying for all these patents just to make a point of how messed up the USPTO is. But then I think I wonder who'd be whining the loudest if software patents were to be found invalid?
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
It allows for dynamic highlighting of text.
Wait a second... Yiddish spelling Nazi?!?!?!
Godwin's law strikes again!
Uhhh, This thread's over now.
As always ignore the title or abstract of a patent.
What they are trying to patent is described by the claims, and those claims need to be fully described within the detailed descriptions (enough detail to allow another skilled in the art to actually create the invention without undue experimentation). If people with access to the patented invention actually need to reverse engineer it in order to make the invention (which they cannot sell without permission), then that makes for a solid argument to invalidate the patent--because the purpose of the patent is to force the inventor to disclose all the secret sauce to the public (via the patent application) in exchange for a temporary monopoly that automatically expires.
The inventor's primary independent method claim is #1
"1. A method for emphasizing numerical data contained in an electronic document, the method comprising: determining whether a request to emphasize all of the numerical data in the electronic document has been received; and in response to receiving the request, locating all of the numerical data contained within the electronic document and emphasizing the located numerical data."
If the patent examiner determines that the above independent claim on its own is not novel (has prior art), or does not have utility, or not described in enough detail within the detailed specs, or is obvious, or is *anticipated* by prior art then any of these conditions can be used to strike it down.
If the independent claim is denied for any such reasons, the dependent claims #2 - #7 get added on to the independent claim to see if the combination will be accepted by the examiner. This serves to make an overly broad rejected independent claim into a more narrowly defined claim which might avoid describing prior art or being anticipated or being obvious or etc.
So there you have it. For any patent that gets issued, you will be hard-pressed to find a set of claims that have not been vastly modified after the initial application due to rejections.
The balance is that if the patent claims are too broad, someone will eventually discover prior art that will invalidate it. And if the claims are too narrow, then everyone will easily find ways to create the invention by leveraging what is described while more easily avoiding the narrow claims.
Here are the dependent claims I mentioned:
2. The method of claim 1, wherein the electronic document comprises both text data and numerical data and wherein the request comprises a request to emphasize only the numerical data.
3. The method of claim 2, wherein the numerical data comprises numerals and numerals expressed as text data.
4. The method of claim 3, wherein the numerical data may be expressed in any of a plurality of natural languages.
5. The method of claim 4, wherein the numerals expressed as text data may comprise string numbers, ordinal numbers, or roman numerals.
6. The method of claim 5, wherein emphasizing only the numerical data comprises adding a highlighting attribute to the located numerical data.
7. The method of claim 6, wherein the highlighting attribute comprises a color attribute.
8. The method of claim 7, wherein a unique color attribute may be specified for each of the string numbers, the ordinal numbers, and the roman numerals.
9. The method of claim 8, further comprising: receiving a request to deemphasize the located numerical data; and in response to receiving the request, removing the emphasis from the located numerical data.
Can't wait till Microsoft sues HP (purchased Compaq, which purchased DEC) for the VT100 terminals, Ken Arnold (developed curses package), IBM for TSO, and Dan Bricklin for VisiCalc. Should be interesting.
[Insert pithy quote here]
This IS the US Patent system we're talking about. They don't even have pens there, just rubber stamps.
And all the stamps have the same word on them.
Can you gess the word?
"Live Free or Die." Don't like it? Then keep out of the USA
OMG! Now Graph::Easy (see search.cpan.org) is illegal:
[ 99 ] -> [ Bottles ] => [ Wall ]
will generate:
# echo "[ 99 ] -> [ Bottles ] => [ Wall ]" |examples/as_ascii
+----+ +---------+ +------+
| 99 | --> | Bottles | ==> | Wall |
+----+ +---------+ +------+
I hope the north-american patent system collapses before it does too much damage to society.
(Oh, and dang the lamenessfilter! grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr)
Tels
Not if we link to your patent. :-)
--------
This isn't the sig you're looking for. Move along.
There is no reason to be "scared" of this. Microsoft has never sued anyone for violating their patents, they register them as a defensive measure, so you can't patent the same thing and then sue them for usin git.
Anyone see the T-shirts Manny Ramirez of Boston Red Sox fame had made up? It simply says "Manny Being Manny".
Time for the "Microsoft Being Microsoft" shirts.
If a pion (n-) collides with a proton in the woods & noone is there to hear it, does lamdba decay into the source pa
This will no doubt be applied to some sort of search engine technology. Imagine searching for "Final Fantasy VII" and finding all of its variations, "Final Fantasy Seven" and "Final Fantasy 7".
Or OSX, OS 10, OS 10.0, and Tiger.
Sigs are for Terrorists.
Can I patent hilighting numbers by circling them?
--
"Open source is good." - Steve Jobs
"Open source is evil." - Microsoft
why should i prove the non existence of something to you? I think you need to proce the existence of it to me....
Because everyone would like to see proof of YOUR claims. I CANNOT (and would not) help prove your case because of your stance... that would be RIDICULOUSE on my part.
set a band of hackers, the size of the ones going after windows, after linux instead.
Why would ANYONE (other than Bill Gaffs & co) want to help bring down (attack) Linux, whos roots built the worlds telephon sys and InterNet!
i'm just sick of the brainless MS bashing by people who couldn't care less about facts vs blathering opinion
Most people, many MANY companies and the Doj will STRONGLY disagree with you.
Someone(s) need to stop this madness by a 'few' in order to save the Masses.
You 'say' you do not love Ms. (pronouced Mizz) but if your NOT with us.. then you are against us! (quoted fr: Gorge Bush). :[
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
One of my favorite lines to see in a patent:
..."
"As known to those skilled in the art,
This was used in the aforementioned patent to say that a word processor is a tool for electronically editing documents.
Are you "skilled in the art"?
Read claim 1 against the following method in MS Word 97.
1. Choose edit -- find and replace
2. Find what = ^#
3. Replace with = (highlight)
4. Replace All.
The result is that all arabic numbers belome colored.
Now, if the new patent has anything new, it's that it finds ALL forms of the numeric data, even in text ("one thousand nine hundred ninety-seven"). So, the PTO should reject most of the draft claims. If any claims do issue, they will have to be severely narrowed.
[forty two]
-- oh no!will he stop there?
[42] !! OMG. Call the patent office.
That is not a patent.
That is an assignment.
An assignemtn is basically application to apply for a patent, they have 1 year to actually get a patent passed before it expires.
The uspto will push back if the patent is too broad and make them refine it.
Also, this is a very broad patent, its not just for computers, its for an electronic document. that covers quite a bit.
--Ne auderis delere orbem rigidum meum, non erravi pernicose!
"Patent lawyers, patent lawyers, patent lawyers..."
Nothing is considered obvious anymore. After all, if it was THAT obvious, somebody would have patented it already. Yes, the US patent system is broken. The only disagreement possible is in exactly HOW it's broken. If you listen to patent lawyers, it's broken because the USPTO's fees go into the general budget. If you listen to patent victims, it's broken because mere thoughts are being patented. If you give me a problem, and I can solve it in my head using nothing more than pencil and paper as a scratchpad, that solution should not be patentable.
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
It sounds like what they are trying to patent would be useful for highlighting something you search for in your Desktop Search and then choose the "View In" option. Imagine MS Word or Outlook popping up and displaying your document with your search terms highlighted.
This sounds familiar... oh right, Google (and many other search engines) have been using something similar for years to highlight/box terms that need "enhancement."
Erik http://yakko.cs.wmich.edu/~rattles
Once Again, I have 20 years of PRIOR ART on a patent application. Go to Google, select ViewTouch, select Search Images. Enjoy. And somebody please submit this evidence to whomever is contesting this patent application.
PS: Here's one example
http://www.viewtouch.com/vtscrn3.png
But my dance moves are so much fresher this way
I really don't see the point in patenting something like boxing test/numbers to make it stand out. And if Microsoft axully gets a patent for it what are they going to try and patent next? Maybe showing white names on a blue background in bold print.
Is it not painfully obvious that IP law in this country is a trainwreck ... no a chemical tanker train car wreck.
I just commented to my wife, "Microsoft is trying to patent numbers now." Her response: "I hope Bill Gates doesn't have any children."
But, I would think that a macro called from within an HTML editor that surrounded every 'number' with <em> would be a potential violation, especially if the macros were processed by a dynamically linked library. There could be a bajillion ways that this could make life miserable for anyone who processes text. I suggest that we all start inventing new numbers not covered by the patent and staticly compiling any software for text processing.
Think global, act loco
Guess what I just made?
Guess what they're gonna do nothing about?
We have secretly replaced these Slashdot mods' sense of humor with a rusty nail. Let's see if they notice!!
Next week, Microsoft will patent numbers, period.
In vim, just execute (without the spaces Slashcode is putting in after "seven" and "milli"): /\([0-9]\|one\|\two\|three\|four\|five\|six\|seven \|eight\|nine\|ten\|teen\|hundred\|thousand\|milli on\)\+/
/xxxxxxx/
To clear it just do:
or some other pattern not in your file.
You can even map it to a key if you want...
of course, that comes from being able to match any arbitrary regular expression & highlight it; and it doesn't even require a DLL.
- "History shows again and again how nature points out the folly of men" -- Blue Oyster Cult, 'Godzilla'
No, only one reason: lawyers. As soon as you have a class of people who have a vested interest in twisting intent and language and then put them in charge of the system, you're screwed.
Juries should be used for all cases, lawyers are unavoidable, but judges should not be lawyers and should not have any role other than making sure the jury is not rigged or otherwise tampered with. The court should provide the jury with copies of all laws cited in the case, and NO CASE LAW should ever be admitted. Case law is a lawyer's best friend in that it allows every stupid, moronic, or plain corrupt judgement to be given equal weight as the law drawn up by those that actually have been elected to do so. This is a lawyer's conception designed by them for their own benefit to allow endless, and expensive, argument back and forth about cases which have nothing to do with each other or the current one.
All laws should be open to interpretation on a case-by-case basis; lawyers always argue that they should be applied blindly, and then set out to blind the judge and jury.
Frankly, I'm not sure why Microsoft is screwing around with this box/display thing. Why don't they just patent numbers and be done with it? (*Note to any MS patent-drone employees reading this: I'm joking.)
The Random Obituary Generator of Doom
Heck, anyone that's done anything in the document imaging field has known about this kind of thing for years. OCR software and forms processing applications have always had the ability to pick out and highlight whatever important information you wanted to extract or emphasize.
I was reading the posts in this this thread and just thought of something that might help with the patent situation. What if patents like these were posted in this exact manner to slashdot and we has a community formalized our collective responses as a sort of Open Patent Research Initiative or something like that.
I mean most of us are patently (ha!) against software and business process patents but we're definitly against these stupid patents. Until the law changes we can't do anything about the patents that meet the requirements, so if we as a community could be used as a resource for patent application research, that could be a good thing. My thoughts are not well formed as I don't have a lot of time to flesh this out, so if you're so inclined please take over the championing of this idea.
Anyway, the idea would be to provide a open resource to the patent office to help them in their review efforts. What if we did such a good job that they started posting more of their patent applications for public review? Slashdot could be the forum (or one of them) in which this took place. Moderators could then mod up the posts that were most relevant in the defense of or against the patent application.
Just a thought. We might not have the strength to be able to swing our congress representatives into action, but it doesn't mean we can still affect change!
HA, great, nice headline, kind of fark like. ..or at least destin for mainstream media.
Can someone skip to the end and tell me how this nonsense will ever end.
2. Implement it using regex/Perl
3. ???
4. Profit!
After all with all those highlighted numbers one needs a way to find the text between the numbers...
When I click on the link to view the images, my browser tells me:
No appropriate application found!
If Mozilla can already determine that a patent isn't very useful, it should be a piece of cake for Mozilla to determine that an invention is obvious and thus should not be patentable in the first place. Why isn't the USPTO using this technology?
FreeSpeech.org
10) any phrase that starts with "I for one welcome our new..."
9) Bases (All your base are belong to ME!)
8) Forums
7) 1337 5p34| 6) Software Bugs (I'm sure there is some previous art I'll have to deal with).
5) Any program that has "profit" for one of it's steps
4) Beer
3) Hot Grits
2) Tpyos/Misspelling
1) Stupidity
Purely out of curiosity, the last time I saw that term used, (and it was twenty odd years ago), it was MAD for Mutually Assured Destruction.
Where did the extra D come from?
Don't let THEM immanentize the Eschaton!
Therefore no more patents can be requested , this is bill's way of ending the ridiculous us patent scheme
Can anyone who is not a patent attorney or patent troll give a good reason why patents should continue to exist?
According to the contitution, patents are supposed to "promote the progress of science and the useful arts". But it seems like all they're used for these days is to take ownership of an obvious idea and use it as a weapon against competitors.
Patents are also supposed to help the little guy bring something to market by providing a barrier to entry for big players who could leverage their resources to push the inventor out of the market, but they don't seem to be serving this purpose in practice--the big players can just ignore the inventor's patent and then countersue with fifteen other patents if the inventor tries to assert it against them.
Is the industry really better off having this legalized extortion system in place? Or should patents be abolished altogether?
http://home.att.net/~jbcole/humor/Microsoft_patent s.htm
It puts the lotion on it's skin, or else it gets the hose again.
worked for me without having to restart firefox
...if the USPTO researchers looked to sites like /. for evidence of obviousness and/or prior art, before issuing a patent (at least for patents which -- for whatever reason -- manage to become ./ headlines)?
/. crowd to come up with multiple examples of prior art.
As you mentioned, with the amazing breadth and depth of technical knowledge/experience here, it doesn't take more than 15 minutes for the
Then again, while we're dreaming, might as well dream big...it'd be even better if the US banned software patents altogether.
In fact this is one of the regexp that I find easy to read.
/i is just for case insensitive...
For those who don't like Perl, the same regexp
is also valid for PHP, Python, Ruby, Java or JavaScript or Qt3.
Just get rid of the ?: which is just there to say
that the parenthesis should not be "tagging".
Basically, it's just a condensed enumeration of all possible numbering nouns with a bunch of -OR- operator all over the place with repetition where the language makes sense.
and the
of course, you could also rewrite it as a large sequence of small regexp if you prefer that...
I am obviously (pun intended) disregarding your call for non-patent attorneys as I am one. I normally respond negatively to these Slashdot stories criticizing people for filing "stupid" patents. Normally, the OP over-simplifies and labels as "stupid" a patent application that is much more complex than it gets credit for.
But in this case, I have to agree with the OP. This patent application is absurd and Microsoft should be ashamed for filing it. But I am not ready to condemn the USPTO until they actually grants this.
Thats just one more "£$%*%& stupid thing to patent; the displaying of data.
Perhaps, 'syntax highlighting' will be the next.
Why UNIX?
But, Firefox will show the pictures (badly) if you have Quicktime. Let's stick to complaining when browsers don't display "standards compliant" pages correctly.
I8-D
"As known to those skilled in the art, the word processing application program 10 is operative to provide functionality for creating and editing electronic documents, such as the electronic document 24. According to one embodiment of the invention, the word processing application program 10 comprises the WORD word processing application program from MICROSOFT CORPORATION. It should be appreciated, however, that other word processing application programs from other manufacturers may be utilized to embody the various aspects of the present invention."
The problem with obviousness comes with the idea of motivation. As a patent examiner I can attest that the hardest problem combining two or more references together is the need for a motivation. A need that judgements handed down by the Supreme Court in the 1960s did not require, but the circuit court decided were important. This is actually an issue that a company is trying to get in front of the Supreme Court and they actually have support from, the evil Microsoft. This is something you should all want, for without the need for a motivation it would be 10 times easier to make obviousness rejections under 35 USC 103. Also I recommmend some of you read the MPEP, which I am pretty sure is on the uspto site, and then complain that we cannot do our job. If any of you read that and feel like you can do the job, apply already and shuddup. If I could remember the name of that case I would tell you, but your courts have actually made our job harder. Also remember if you know of prior art for an existing patent bring it to the attention of those who would be interested (ie companies in the same field). Re-examination do happen and we can always take away an issued patent.
"Some days you just can't get rid of a bomb."
Images go in tag.
And code posted to
I8-D
1. Receive patent application
2. Check USPTO website to see if it is patented in USA
3. ???
4. Profit!
I hold a patent on: Using vague and ambiguous NewSpeak in retarded patent applications. I'll sic my lawyers on them.
...I was thinking they had put a patent on making text bold.
We had to verify that all numbers, of whatever style, were correctly formatted in a 1200+ page document. We also had to cross check the numbers in the document - mingled in the text - against the specs in another document. This was such a monumental PITA that I wrote a macro to find them and make them a gaudy color. The reverse macro was not needed because we manually restored the color to normal as each instance was corrected. It would have been extremely easy to write.
If Everything gets patented now, in 20 years, nothing will remain to be patented. So in the medium future you'll be able to build and sell dang near anything.
The text of the patent displays nicely, but the images are nowhere to be viewed, and the text isn't simplicated enough to tell me what the hell it is they've managed to get by the USTPO's blind clerks now.
Damn, we have got to fix this patent BS.
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Simply because to avoid getting sued the current EU-laws would perfectly suffice. Yet Microsoft wants to see them changed.
A. Sue the makers of popular non-microsoft IDEs... maybe?
I didn't realize Redmond was so cosmopolitan. Do the inventors have to live in the USA for Microsoft to get a patent?
MS$ is about to come out with a competitor to Froogle. That is the reason for this patent.
Their lawyers should be disbarred for patent application abuse, as per the patent law. And jailed. And put in the centerfold of _Lawyer Monthly_ as "Miss (Frog) March".
--
make install -not war
And just think ... without the patent system to protect and support innovation, we wouldn't have had this new invention.
Numbers in boxes. Why next, they'll be inventing non-numeric text in boxes, but I don't really think it is technically possible. How could they pull it off with all the difficulties to overcome?
But they really should get a patent on it if they do work out how to do that too! The human race desperately needs such new technology to fight the battle against want.
I am anarch of all I survey.
It's how the inventor emphasizes numbers in text that is patentable; not the general concept of text highlighting.
From Wikipedia:Cartouche
A cartouche, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, is an oblong enclosure with a vertical line at one end, indicating that the text enclosed is a royal name, coming into use during the beginning of the Fourth Dynasty with pharao Sneferu. The Ancient Egyptian word for it was shenu, and it was essentially an expanded shen ring.
Removing the formatting was also possible:
From Wikipedia:Hatshepsut
After her death, many of her monuments were defaced or destroyed. Replacing the names on older monuments with the name of the current ruler was a common practice of pharaohs, but in some cases this is thought to have been an act of damnatio memoriae--condemning a person by erasing him or her from recorded existence
I have no idea what microsoft intends with this patent, but I do know there are many people whose brains handle numerical data differently enough from linguistic data that picking out numerical nomenclature out of a large body of text would prove difficult. I imagine that certain industries might find it useful, or that someone has requested that Microsoft invent the technology... although it looks little more than a curiosity for me. Although you can create the same effect in HTML and CSS, it's not dynamic. You can't input text and have it do the same thing automatically. You probably could using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, but that would be ugly.
Mark Anthony Collins
It was called "reverse video" in the mainframe/mini "green screen" days. You simply told the monitor to reverse the contrast for a "character block(s)". Each character was actually treated like a rectangular block. Reversing the contrast of such a block made it look like a dark character in a bright box. Reverse a whole word to make it look like the word is in a rectangle.
Table-ized A.I.
I didn't RTFA, but it occurs to me that whilst /. has been discussing the obviousness of inventions, perhaps we should take a step back and determine whether some of these things are actually inventions at all.
/idea/ of curing cancer, even if you don't know how to do it. Then, if anyone comes along and actually cures it, then you can sue them.
Software patenting seems to have reached the stage where it's like you can patent the
And in fact, we've even reached that low and started digging, because hey, although people have obviously thought of the idea of curing cancer, no-one's actually patented the idea, so let's go ahead and patent it anyway.
...there seems to be a preponderance of Patents that appear on their face to be just simply rubber-stamped. All one needs to do is look at over 50% of the stuff out there these days and see that it fails on prior-art (as in nobody bothered to verify there wasn't any...), obviousness, or general principles (i.e. You shouldn't be able to patent nature, genetics (the processes you use to accomplish a GMO can be patented, but they shouldn't be able to patent the GMO itself...), etc.). I've issues about patenting software in general; there's notable exceptions that MIGHT be arguable that they should be Patented- but overall software is little more than a mathematical formula, which can't be Patented per the current messed up ruleset for them.
They're perfectly happy to bounce other patents on these grounds, but if you're someone like Amazon or Microsoft, they seem to get the silliest damn Patents granted to them.
While YOUR experience and knowlege doesn't map to the "rubber-stamping" comments directed at the USPTO, the outside experience that everyone sees shows something different.
And, before you comment about my not knowing what I'm talking about, I've got one Patent pending, one more about to be applied for and budget pending three to four more after that. I'm filing for what I consider to be mostly legitimate things (Nothing like this BS Microsoft or Amazon seems to get accepted...)- and I'm seeing this from the pathway. No, not all of them are being rubber-stamped, but there's enough silly things getting through that lend to the impression that there is a lot of that going on in the USPTO- one that's really hard to shake.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
So this is basically syntax highlighting.
So I wonder, if I edit the syntax highlighting rules of my editor to also highlight textual numbers (it already does the pure integers), will I or the author of my text editor be in trouble? :)
Looks to me that they patented bold, underline and italic for numbers. Next is highlighters on paper and blink. Notice that they say box and electronic document. This could be anything - TV set, PC, pdf file, what a useless all encompassing patent.
<?php
.= fread($fp, 1024);
// Time to piss in Bill Gates' coffee....
$fp = fopen('test.txt', 'r');
while(!feof($fp)) $doc
fclose($fp);
$doc = preg_replace("/(\d+)/", "<i style=\"color: black; background-color: yellow; font-weight: bold;\">$1</i>", $doc);
echo $doc;
?>
Amazon has already patented "highlighting", i.e., applying markup to search results (Google and various old text browsers have been doing that years ago).
The M$ patent described here refers to applying markup to the search results provided by one particular search pattern. To use it M$ should probably get a license from Amazon.
It seems that the only thing that is "innovative" here is a list of search strings that together should act as a search for "Numbers". The rest is just the highlighting of search results that is already in the Amazon patent. And M$ main thing here is probably to prevent Google from patenting a similar list of search strings that collectively approximate "being a number". I count on Google to find a better way that does'nt need a list of search terms but instead uses AI to recognize numbers. (Another motivation is to prevent word processors other than M$ Word or web browsers other than IE from including "search for numbers" functionality, or at least the functionality of displaying them all at once, and not using "find next" to see them one by one... Is there a separate patent on finding numbers that doesn't include "highlighting"?))
Is this even worth arguing with you? Linux hasn't been around long enough to build the roots of the internet. The roots of the internet go back several decades. And the telephone system? My gosh that's a pathetic statement if i ever saw one. The telephone system has been around almost a century... Linux? Just over a decade. Get a clue....
The DOJ hasn't taken action against MS in ages and the only reason it did is because some loudmouthed guy wouldnt shut up about how vile MS was and eventually someone fell for his pathetic act...
Take your conspiracy theories elsewhere and learn how to spell and punctuate properly. MS is not some disease. Linux is not some Godsend. They both have mountains of problems and they both have mountains of benefits.
ABOUT NOTHING!!
Is this even worth arguing with you? Linux hasn't been around long enough to build the roots of the internet.
Here's the history (for everyone else to read) and the relationship of Linux to Unix, Unix to Univac (first business computer system from the 1940's, when the phone network was being built on a large scale), and finally The TeleGraph (via American Telephone & Telegraph (aka AT&T).
Notice that Ms. was not a mountain of problems back then, it wasn't even a mole hill yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linux
And the telephone system? My gosh that's a pathetic statement if i ever saw one. The telephone system has been around almost a century
My last post referred to 'world' phone system-- past AND current,(maybe you should stop worrying about my netiquette and learn how to read/comprehend).
Note that the first intercontinental links were not made until 1956.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unix
and
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ATT
and
http://internet-pioneers.org/archives/early.histor y.of.unix.html
The DOJ hasn't taken action against MS in ages and the only reason it did is because some loudmouthed guy wouldnt shut up about how vile MS was and eventually someone fell for his pathetic act...
The Evil Dragooon is still under the watchful eyez of the Doj..
And yes, isn't it a WONDERFUL thing that ONE big mouth can cause soooo much trouble for such a vicious criminal as Bill Gaffs!!
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
Guys, keep this on the QT, I am working on a patent for a new process by which I will put numbers in a box to emphasize the box!