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Will Microsoft Put The Colonel in the Kernel?
theodp writes "The kernel meets The Colonel in a just-published Microsoft patent application for an Advertising Services Architecture, which delivers targeted advertising as 'part of the OS.' Microsoft, who once teamed with law enforcement to protect consumers from unwanted advertising, goes on to boast that the invention can 'take steps to verify ad consumption,' be used to block ads from competitors, and even sneak a peek at 'user document files, user e-mail files, user music files, downloaded podcasts, computer settings, [and] computer status messages' to deliver more tightly targeted ads."
I'm not sure about the legality of Claim 11... I'm not an ambulance-chaser, but it'd seem that retrieving "user document files, user email, user music files, podcast files, computer status messages, and a profile database storing existing tag data" without our consent/knowledge would be prosecutable...
Don't tell me to get a life. I'm a gamer; I have LOTS of lives!
*cough* You didn't read Asimov's books, did you?
the movie wasn't a telling of the story I, Robot...
Everything's gotten tons better since RedHat 4. Try Ubuntu - it seems to work with almost everything, and has a very large and helpful user base.
I got my Linux laptop at System76.
I'm pretty sure that Windows 95 was a task manager / GUI layer running on top of DOS 7. The Kernel was rather Mach-like with tightly bound cruft layers, and came out with WIN NT (the even more crashy and useless series 3.xx) circa 1993. A marvel of "engineering" that will soon bind in even more helpful utilities for the burgeoning malware community. Too darn bad.
It's actually more like the default. The description is just that, a description. You need a proper description, but it's still the actual claims that define your invention. The description can sometimes be used to interpret those claims.