Bill Gates Seeking Patent To Make Shakespeare Less Boring

theodp writes "GeekWire reports that Bill Gates and Nathan Myhrvold are seeking a patent on making textbooks less boring by using a cellphone or other device to scan text on a page, parse its meaning, and automatically create suitable accompanying video or pictures to keep students engaged. From the patent application for Autogenerating Video From Text: 'A student is assigned a reading assignment. To make the assignment more interesting, the student may use his or her mobile phone to take a picture of a page of the textbook. The systems and methods described herein may then generate a synthesized image sequence of the action occurring in the text. Thus, rather than simply reading names and dates, the student may see soldiers running across a battlefield.' Furthermore, the patent explains, the experience may be tailored to a user's preferences: 'For example, in a video clip about a Shakespearean play, the preference data may be used to insert family members into the video clip instead of the typical characters.'"

Comments

Prior Art?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure the 'reduced shakespeare company' might have something to say about making the bard more interesting.
If the USPTO grant patents on this then I for one hope that a huge hole opens up and swallows the entire USA. Just adding 'by a computer' or 'in a network' really does not seem very original and non obvious.

Re:Prior Art?

[BrokenHalo]

I'm sure the 'reduced shakespeare company' might have something to say about making the bard more interesting.

Shakespeare is never boring. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs either an English comprehension course or medication for attention deficit disorder.

Re:Prior Art?

[MaskedSlacker]

I'm all for a wider diversity of readings, but you need to lay off the crack-pipe. Virtually all of those "diverse authors" are also mono-cultural.

Re:Prior Art?

[BrokenHalo]

Shakespeare is mono-cultural, reason enough for it to be discarded upon the ashcan of history

Right. Which is why Shakespeare's work has been successfully performed in Hindi, Mandarin and Arabic.

You are perfectly entitled to not appreciate Shakespeare, but you are not entitled to take his work away from those who do.

Re:Prior Art?

[uninformedLuddite]

We can definitely fix it with a diversity computer. People can also get wealthier destroying anglo-saxon culture. It's all the rage.

Re:Prior Art?

[PingPongBoy]

Shakespeare is never boring. Anyone who thinks otherwise needs either an English comprehension course or medication for attention deficit disorder.

Yes, I knew something was off when I saw the title. Actually he has an invention to make Slashdot less boring.

A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[Bob_Who]

Has it worked on any of his textbooks yet, or just on iambic pentameter?

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[reve_etrange]

I'm not sure what "it" is since the patent itself doesn't describe an algorithm. It's just a wish list of potential features.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure what "it" is since the patent itself doesn't describe an algorithm. It's just a wish list of potential features.

Isn't that how *all* software patents are, nowadays? A lot of hand-waving and absolutely zero meat.

Imagine if all patents were like SW patents. You could patent the flying car, and all you need to write is a description of what your flying car will/should be able to do. And anyone who actually builds such a flying car will be hit over the head with your patent! That's totally Apple's style of doing business.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[jythie]

'Wish' is right. This might make a nice bit of speculative fiction, maybe the core of some future story about a dystopian eduction system where the heroin discovers that evil people have altered the universal animation program to deliver subconscious ads for soyelnt green into the minds of impressionable youth causing an increase in demand for human flesh resulting in a sharp population decline allowing the villains to buy up all the twinky factories before a radioactive comet hits the earth (which they have been suppressing) allowing only them to live. Add a cute side kick and a puppy and we have next summer's blockbuster movie... all thanks to Bill Gates and his wonderful imagination.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[Opportunist]

If all patents were like software patents, the perpetuum mobile would have been successfully patented a long, long time ago.

Re: A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[dwywit]

Well done, sir. I grant you the win in this case, but not when the mods judge our race.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[arth1]

If all patents were like software patents, the perpetuum mobile would have been successfully patented a long, long time ago.

Like US 6,362,718 and US 6,867,514, you mean?

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[__aaltlg1547]

If all patents were like software patents, there wouldn't be any computers to run the software on.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[__aaltlg1547]

'Wish' is right. This might make a nice bit of speculative fiction, maybe the core of some future story about a dystopian eduction system where the heroin discovers that evil people have altered the universal animation program....

I knew there were drugs involved.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[dbIII]

A lot of hand-waving and absolutely zero meat

Software responding to phrase - disable hard core porn and enable romantic comedy function.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[Princeofcups]

That's totally Apple's style of doing business.

You were good up until the Apple hate bubbled over. Apple does not sue for things that they thought up but never implemented. Apple sues over simple things that they did implement. Gotta keep your frivolous law suits straight.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[Theaetetus]

I'm not sure what "it" is since the patent itself doesn't describe an algorithm. It's just a wish list of potential features.

Yes, it does - see figures 4-8 and the accompanying description.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[cellocgw]

Software responding to phrase - disable hard core porn and enable romantic comedy function.

Came to see if Rule34 was invoked in thread. Was not disappointed.

Meanwhile, just imagine how well this new device would work on /. threads!

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[Zordak]

The +5, Funny was well-deserved. But lest anybody get too worked up, those actually claim to work on exhaustable energy stored in permanent magnets (I'm not a material scientist, so I don't know if that's a real thing, but they don't pretend to be perpetual motion). In fact, the USPTO has specific regulations for rejecting perpetual motion machines. If you want to get a patent on one, you have to submit a working model. I am very grateful for this regulation, because it has been a handy way to show folks the door a couple of times. "I'm sorry. I can't file this for you. It's a perpetual motion machine. The USPTO will only grant it after you have a working model. So please come back after you've got that prototype built." (They will argue with you for hours about why it will work if you let them.)

On the other hand, I did successfully craft the argument that got this gem issued. It's not perpetual motion, but it does involve some rather "non-traditional" scientific theories.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[Zordak]

It's sentient heroin. That's what makes it summer blockbuster fare.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[Zordak]

Ah, that makes sense. We can patent algorithms, business models, and now summer blockbuster ideas!

You joke, but this clown is actually trying to do it. (If you want to see the stunning storyline that is so brilliant it deserves a patent, look at the claim listed here.)

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[jythie]

Heh. Amusing what dropping a silent e can do ^_^

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[udippel]

Look, matey, had you bothered to read the parent, and bothered to look up the two patents cited, you would have noted, that the USPTO fails miserably at following its own directives.
Both patents clearly disclose a very old and very wrong assumption; that by rotating a magnet in an electric filed and switching the polarity, this magnet starts to spin from the rotated magnet field.

You are right w.r.t. the 'gem' on water treatment. I can only ask: how would one refute this application? Looking at the claims, it says nothing supernatural; that is only in the description. And now? Does a system of vortices like those described exist or not? If not, it is patentable. Even if - in the end - it is used for something quite different; and successfully so.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[reve_etrange]

This patent is almost entirely composed of statements such as "The context analysis module 316 is configured to interpret the received text," which means nothing. It's just a statement of a wish for such a module, with no disclosure of how such a module might, in fact, work.

You are mistaken about the purpose of a patent, which is disclose how an invention functions, not to reserve types of functionality regardless of implementation.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[Theaetetus]

This patent is almost entirely composed of statements such as "The context analysis module 316 is configured to interpret the received text," which means nothing. It's just a statement of a wish for such a module, with no disclosure of how such a module might, in fact, work.

Here's the full quote:

The context analysis module 316 is configured to receive text in a machine-readable format from the image to text module 314. The context analysis module 316 is configured to interpret the received text. In one embodiment, the interpretation of the text includes analyzing the text for contextual cues. The contextual cues may relate to a setting, a character, a pose or action, and other defined objects as identified by the text. For example, individual words may be identified by the context analysis module 316 that relate to a specific location or setting (e.g., 16.sup.th Century England, Wisconsin, a house, Main Street, etc.), a specific person (e.g., Shakespeare, Einstein, mother, father, etc.), a specific action (e.g., running, talking, exercising, etc.), a pose (e.g., standing, sitting, etc.) or otherwise. As another example, a series of words may be identified that relate to a specific action and specific object (e.g., a person running, a car driving down a road, a phone ringing, etc.). In other words, the context analysis module 316 is configured to provide context to the literal interpretation of actions described by the text.

[0062] In addition to providing context to the literal interpretation of the text, the context analysis module 316 may determine an origin of the text. The origin of the text may be determined by identifying any slang or dialect in the words, by determining if the text has appeared in any books, plays, or other forms of media, or otherwise. For example, upon analysis of the text, it may be determined that the origin of the text is from a Shakespearean play. A setting or location of 16.sup.th Century England may then be determined by the context analysis module 316. As another example, if the text includes names of historical figures from an era and location, the era and location may be set as the setting or location (e.g., the name Julius Caesar may lead to an identification of ancient Rome as a setting or location, the name Abraham Lincoln may indicate a setting of the United States Civil War Era, etc.).

That's pretty clear on how the module works - it parses the text looking for one or more predefined words, such as a dictionary-based search. Some of those words are used to determine the origin of the text.

You are mistaken about the purpose of a patent, which is disclose how an invention functions, not to reserve types of functionality regardless of implementation.

I didn't say anything about the purpose of a patent, so why exactly do you think I'm mistaken? What I said, in its entirety, was "Yes, it does - see figures 4-8 and the accompanying description" in response to your inaccurate statement that the application didn't include an algorithm. Don't try to put words in peoples' mouths in a public forum where anyone can simply scroll up to see that you're lying.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[Zordak]

Look, matey, had you bothered to read the parent, and bothered to look up the two patents cited, you would have noted, that the USPTO fails miserably at following its own directives. Both patents clearly disclose a very old and very wrong assumption; that by rotating a magnet in an electric filed and switching the polarity, this magnet starts to spin from the rotated magnet field.

Like I said, I'm not judging whether they're scientifically sound. I'm just saying that they claim that the energy supply is exhaustable, so they're not perpetual motion machines. (And no, I didn't read them carefully. I just glanced over them and saw that they were claiming to mine energy stored in permanent magnets.) The USPTO will not necessarily reject your claim merely because it's pseudo-science (see MPEP 2107.01(II); "Incredible Utility"). It just needs to not be a flagrant violation of all known laws of physics (a FTL ship would probably fall in this same category).

I can only ask: how would one refute this application?

Why would you refute this application? Do you want to build one of these? Actually, if you do, you're probably okay, because it looks like they never paid the maintenance fee, so this one is dead.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[nbauman]

A patent is supposed to be "enabling," which means it should enable someone skilled in the art to create it (after the patent expires, for example). If it doesn't tell you how to make a working product, it's not a valid patent.

Or at least that's my understanding of patent law. IANAL.

Re:A patent on making textbooks less boring?

[rtb61]

Actually this patent really stinks of it to the point that it is not an application for a single patent, but a grab bag for a whole bunch of patents for all the steps in between, more than a hundred patents jammed in there for the cost of one. When you start to look at the steps, you can start to see how dangerous this patent application is. Will the USPTO pass it, off course, it doesn't give a crap about anything except generating a ton of legal fees within the US.

What problem

[Anonymous Coward]

What problem are they trying to solve here? If people don't want to read, why force them? Sure, reading is a skill we all should possess, but by doing this you don't help with learning how to read at all. So all the benefits of forcing them to read are removed.

Re:What problem

[Anonymous Coward]

First, kids are forced to read Shakespeare now, like it or not.

Second, this clearly isn't being done in order to teach people to read. It seems like an attempt to enhance reading experiences.

I don't think much will really come from this but come on, use some imagination. Maybe a memorable visual will help somebody remember something. Maybe it's purely for entertainment (which is not worthless).

Myself, I imagine you could get 10 minutes of entertainment seeing what images and videos come out of snippets of text you write in a text editor. I really doubt I'd use it for Shakespeare.

Re:What problem

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but most stories are stuff you want to read to experience yourself. I can't believe this will ever help you remember any kind of math formulas or whatever, stuff that you have to remember (and even that). I know kids are forced to read books in school, I am fine with that. Its just that if they use this for their book reading, they aren't really learning anything there. Forcing kids to learn books to remember them is just stupid and not really a practical skill.

I imagine people are going to check this out once, find it funny but the novelty will wear off very quickly due to it not being good enough.

Re:What problem

[lxs]

The problem is the mentality that something is only worth doing if it makes you feel better right now. This "solution" only makes things worse. It's like a parent trying to get compliance by bribing their toddler with candy.

Re:What problem

[loufoque]

I don't understand. Reading Shakespeare is enjoyable.
What is wrong with those kids?

Re:What problem

[chthon]

No, no, what is wrong with Bill Gates? (My personal take says: everything)

Gates does not seem to be able to distinguish technology from the way people work.

Re:What problem

[readingaccount]

The problem is the mentality that something is only worth doing if it makes you feel better right now. This "solution" only makes things worse. It's like a parent trying to get compliance by bribing their toddler with candy.

I'd like to connect your quote with something another commenter said:

Why do we object so strongly to the idea of teaching children the value of deferred please; that hard work and effort now can produce greater rewards down the line?

Both of you have the same concern as I do - that as a society we only seem to be interested in short-term efforts if they bring immediate rewards (with the exception of perhaps college, but only because so many people have to these days to get a half-decent job it seems). Long-term investment in time and effort is seen as a waste because the payoff might take quite a while to eventuate... and the problem is that not only is this true, it's also not guaranteed that a payoff will even eventuate after all that work.

Short-term effort shows the results reasonably quickly, good or bad. Long-term effort is a difficult thing to justify in our busy lives, so many people avoid it, whether that be consistent exercise, working on a hobby that will take months to produce something half-decent, or indeed, building any skills that aren't strictly necessary to survive.

Re:What problem

[bfandreas]

I don't understand. Reading Shakespeare is enjoyable. What is wrong with those kids?

The language is now a bit dated. Also the plays are always hard to read if you have no imagination. They were meant to be performed. In many ways this patent describes the job of a director. In which case I would have to decline. Politely.
In most other cases it is a prosthetic for imagination and thought processes.
At this point I would have mandatory philosophy classes just to get the kids back on track. Just the basics. Logic, the nature of knowledge, the old Aristotle vs. Plato argument, Munchhausen trilemma. No complex post-Renaissance/modern stuff. Just a kickstart for the old noggin. Then MAYBE they will learn to read and understand texts, the spirit they were written in and their context.

Re:What problem

[mrbester]

You got lucky. For a lot of kids, Shakespeare is impenetrable, boring and anachronistic. Plus they have to write tedious essay after tedious essay that basically puts them off for life. However, this is entirely the fault of crap teachers and curricula. Note how many kids "don't like Shakespeare" but like films based on the plays such as West Side Story, The Lion King, Forbidden Planet and Ten Things I Hate About You.

Re:What problem

[mwvdlee]

The problem they are trying to solve here is the problem of another company potentially inventing something cool having to do with books and not having a weapon to bludgeon that company into submission.

Re:What problem

[gbjbaanb]

the problem they're trying to solve is one where, in some unspecified future if someone comes up with a way of making textbooks more interactive by inserting multimedia and other content then Billy and Nath won't be able to assert their vague and speculative patent to extort loadsa cash.

By registering this vague and speculative patent, this problem gets solved! hurrah for the boost in innovation and economic prosperity (for Billy and Nath obviously, not the sucker who might actually come up with the innovation and hard work to make such technology work).

Re:What problem

[loufoque]

Yet Romeo + Juliet was perfectly fine to the modern viewer.

Re:What problem

[bfandreas]

Yet Romeo + Juliet was perfectly fine to the modern viewer.

Rome and Juliet is boring pap after Mercutio's death. He is the only likeable character in the whole play. BTW, I liked the movie.

Re:What problem

[loufoque]

The anachronisms are intrinsic to the genre. I doubt most kids are knowledgeable enough to identify all of them anyway.

From what you're saying, it seems that they like the stories, but do not like the act of reading. That's the fault of the parents, not the teachers.

Re:What problem

[dkleinsc]

For a lot of kids, Shakespeare is impenetrable, boring and anachronistic.

I agree that this is bad teaching: I mean, Shakespeare plays have everything you could want in great entertainment - sex, songs, gruesome violence, some drug use, stupid teenage romance, clowns, and sometimes epic proportions.

Re:What problem

[Aguazul2]

Short-term effort shows the results reasonably quickly, good or bad. Long-term effort is a difficult thing to justify in our busy lives, so many people avoid it, whether that be consistent exercise, working on a hobby that will take months to produce something half-decent, or indeed, building any skills that aren't strictly necessary to survive.

I agree. All this will achieve is distract children from actually understanding anything by looking at a feed of supposedly related pictures/videos instead. It reminds me of a YouTube video of "My favorite things" (Sound of Music) in which someone had put clipart pictures of all the things. How completely irrelevant and distracting. The point of the song is not the list of things!

Re:What problem

[Attila the Bun]

The problem is that people are being taught Shakespeare without seeing the plays. The books are just scripts - useful for studying the play, but they were never meant to stand on their own. Without the actors the lines are dry and uninteresting.

Even a video doesn't convey why Shakespeare is regarded as one of the greatest English writers. His plays were meant to be watched in a theatre, where actors can captivate the audience and convey their story. Good actors will make the story clear and accessible to anyone, as Shakespeare intended, in spite of the old-fashioned and sometimes-difficult language. Only then, once you've seen and understood the play can you start to study it in more detail.

The patent sounds technically dubious, but it's not even addressing the real problem.

Re:What problem

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The problem is the mentality that something is only worth doing if it makes you feel better right now. This "solution" only makes things worse. It's like a parent trying to get compliance by bribing their toddler with candy.

It doesn't help that the described 'invention' will actually make the task slower in the attempt to make it palatable; while making the bribe worse by trying to make it 'relevant'. Does anyone suspect that a computer throwing together clip art is going to produce especially compelling footage(except occasionally by sheer accidental absurdity)? Or that time spent watching stock footage of guys with swords is something that helps you in actually reading the text?

If you wanted to bribe kiddo, it'd be far easier to just tell him to read the damn book in exchange for some time to screw around on youtube. This concept has all the vices of bribery; but isn't even as good as the conventional form.

Re:What problem

[_anomaly_]

I wanted to say that I agree 100%.

I also wanted to comment on the suggestion that someone would want to substitute family members into Shakespearean plays. I don't think that whoever wrote that part of the patent text has read any Shakespeare.

Re:What problem

[LordVader717]

The formulas that I found easiest to remember were the ones which were placed next to a diagram or picture. It's not the information that's in the image, but the the extra association which makes recollection easier. It's how our brains work.
I remember seeing an interview with a competitive memory guy and one of his techniques for remembering the order of a pack of cards was to associate each card with an object and make up a story from the sequence. What at first seems completely arbitrary and useless is actually a highly effective memory technique.

Re:What problem

[pr0fessor]

Sound like they are trying to have your device take over for your imagination.

The other day we ran out of aluminum foil and I was telling my son how I had built a model rocket out of the cardboard roll from a box of aluminum foil when I was his age 13yrs old... I told him about building a small generator that would power a light bulb using old speaker magnets and enamel copper wire... he found none of it the least bit interesting and went on about playing his video game.

Re:What problem

[LordVader717]

I suspect by anachronistic he wasn't referring to specific details that have to be identified but rather the character's actions and behavior for the modern reader, as well as the storytelling itself. To deny that the social and literary developments in the last 400 years have had no effect on the perception of Shakespeare is a bit disingenuous.

As for reading skills you could engage in an endless debate about parents vs. teachers, but at the end of the day you have to question the sense in forcing someone to read something they clearly aren't able to appreciate or gain any value from.

Re:What problem

[LordVader717]

If it makes them read it slower that's probably a good thing. Shakespeare can be skimmed over really quickly, but almost every line requires some pondering if you really want to appreciate it.
Your suggestion on the other hand encourages the opposite: Get through the reading requirement as quickly as possible to reap the reward. The parent has managed to transfer his disengagement from the topic to their child. Hardly very useful.

The more successful parent will try to increase the engagement with the medium, and show an interest in the text themselves. You might get through less volume, but chances are the kid is more likely to look at a few Shakespeare clips when they log on to youtube.

Re:What problem

[Baby Duck]

Romeo and Juliet makes no sense. If the "poison fiasco" would have worked as Juliet intended, she would have ran away with Romeo into the country. However, her own father flat out told her he would disown her if she didn't marry that other guy. Why couldn't she just say, "OK!", not marry that dude, let the disownment happen, and run away with Romeo into the country any goddamn way. Why go this elaborate poison route?

You could argue Juliet was just too young, too dumb, too passionate, not clear-headed, etc. However, none of that excuses Friar Laurence who provided the poison and hatched the whole harebrained scheme in the first place.

Your beloved play does not hold up to cursory scrutiny. Admit it. And stop making kids read it for a grade.

Re:What problem

[Em Adespoton]

I don't think much will really come from this but come on, use some imagination. Maybe a memorable visual will help somebody remember something. Maybe it's purely for entertainment (which is not worthless).

I think that's part of the problem here -- computer interpretation is being substituted for imagination. Maybe a memorable visual will help somebody remember something... but more likely it will just narrow the perception of the person using the system.

After all, you can already type a line of Shakespeare into Google and look at the image and video results. For that matter, I'm sure apps already exist that will OCR scanned text and submit it to Google. So this patent isn't novel, nor all that useful.

It might be slightly useful for obscure texts, but I'd think a dialect translator would be more useful (17th century phrases do not always have the same meanings today).

Re:What problem

[Em Adespoton]

As for reading skills you could engage in an endless debate about parents vs. teachers, but at the end of the day you have to question the sense in forcing someone to read something they clearly aren't able to appreciate or gain any value from.

You definitely have to question it; you don't have to reject it though. The idea is to at least expose the kids to something different; something that doesn't line up with how they regularly think. After that point, depending on prior training by parents and teachers, they can either learn to expand their thinking, or be permanently turned off reading classical literature.

Remember: this debate used to be over reading Virgil and Horace in the original Latin -- now Latin's completely off the curriculum, and almost nobody reads Virgil and Horace (even in translation) in public school. Since English is a live language and 17th century literature is becoming increasingly dated, we'll eventually have to only study watered-down re-spins of it, or drop it and study something more recent instead. Or, of course, start making a course in 17th century English and culture mandatory.

Re:What problem

[Em Adespoton]

I also wanted to comment on the suggestion that someone would want to substitute family members into Shakespearean plays. I don't think that whoever wrote that part of the patent text has read any Shakespeare.

Maybe you just haven't met their family....

Re:What problem

[The Cat]

So the practical translation of your statement is

I AM SCIENTIST AND DISPRUVD SHAKESPER! GIRLS R ICKY

That about cover it?

Re:What problem

[udippel]

Let me ask something provocative - no, better, let me state something provocative: I for one love Shakespeare (and others, like Bunuel), and I could give a rat's back-part if it stands up to a reasonable logical scrutiny. I wrote it before, I don't love Shakespeare for his plots. Actually, I don't think three witches ever assembled to foresee the death of the king by the hand of a weakling pressured by his horrible wife. And I don't think that someone fearing soldiers creeping up the hill in disguise with twigs and leafs will actually have made a king in the first place.
And don't ever get me started with some spirits of the air ...

Re:What problem

[fahrbot-bot]

However, none of that excuses Friar Laurence who provided the poison and hatched the whole harebrained scheme in the first place.

Obviously, Romeo and Juliet is *really* about a sadistic serial-killer who's MO is getting people to commit suicide.

Re:What problem

[You're All Wrong]

Hey fellas! Looks like we got a reader here!

Re:What problem

[nukenerd]

I don't understand. Reading Shakespeare is enjoyable.

Shakespeare's plays are not meant to be read, they are meant to be watched. And you don't need Gates' vapourware to watch one - there are many recorded perfomances of any one that you choose, and (at least where I live) there is always a live performance of one somewhere within an hour's drive. Even the most amateurish of the lot will be a million times better than the disjointed farce that this scheme is likely to concoct The actors are going to sound like Stephen Hawking and the Evil Computer in Portal, and I hate to think what it will look like.

Re:What problem

[jfengel]

Wish I had mod points, but since I don't, I'm just gonna agree emphatically.

I am a Shakespearean actor and director, and the issues are exactly what you say they are. Throwing students a copy of the book and telling them to read it is about the worst way to teach Shakespeare. The transformation from the page to the stage takes years to learn.

As an actor, I can get you to understand the text even if you don't know all the words and don't have a glossary. I know what they mean, which drives my performance, but if you're stumbling over unfamiliar text and grammar there's no hope of you following the story. It takes me weeks of studying the lines to understand the full meaning.

I would much rather have them watch a good staged production (NOT just a bunch of other students reading it out loud) and then discuss it with the actors and director. Then go back and read some of the best parts in detail, to figure out how they work and what makes it so effective. Memorize some speeches and learn how the sense of the text matches the rhythm of the meter and the tactic of each line, not just a bunch of syllables to be spat out.

I really hated the way I was taught Shakespeare, and this technology sounds as if it won't make that one whit better. Bringing some actors into schools, however, might do some good.

I want it for

[e70838]

the integral collection of Marquis de Sade

Re:Headline

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.arstechnica.com ./ has become so full of shit and its all thanks to its amazing editors. Job well done

No algorithm should mean no patent

[reve_etrange]

This patent is just a wish list of features with no disclosure of any technique for realizing any of those features.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[Nerdfest]

... also known as a software patent.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[gl4ss]

you know what's funny? such wish lists have been written before.. and it'll be expired by the time people can make it reality in state that's not total bull.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[intermodal]

While I'd tend to agree, and while it would be nice to have this patent expire before that time, I don't like the fact that it may deter people from trying.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[dabadab]

Incidentally, having a patent also means no patent, since algorithms are not patentable.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

I suppose hat's the only hope for a general-purpose robot, that bars and motors hooked together under computer control is long since past patent. Yet it is the AI software that probably is the most deserving of patent of any human invention since, ever. Even flight, fire, agriculture, or wheel, as far as desireability and impact onife is concerned.

Yet it's just an unpatentable "algorithm".

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[Theaetetus]

This patent is just a wish list of features with no disclosure of any technique for realizing any of those features.

Not so. See figures 4-8 and the accompanying description.

Also, why isn't this modded redundant, since you posted the exact same thing earlier?

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[tepples]

However, a computer with memory and appropriate input and output devices executing the algorithm can still be patented.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[oxdas]

I think the complaint here is that there is nothing in those flow charts that reveal how they plan to accomplish this. They have provided many very broad and generic requirements, but they don't reveal any nuts and bolts. The devil's in the details with a system this complex. The result is that no one skilled in programming could take this patent and learn anything about how to make this "invention." Conversely, many people could run afoul of this patent by making a myriad of different implementations that follow a basic framework.

For example, from figure 4, "Generate a model information associated with the text", in figure 5 "Analyze the text for a contextual cue", or from figure 6 "Analyze the second image for auxilary information." All of these are very general and provide no real details to indicate the actual "how" to make this work. For each of these steps there are numerous ways to accomplish "analysis" or "generating a model," but Microsoft doesn't tell us what these vague terms mean in the context of this patent.

Given these figures, Microsoft is claiming an incredibly broad patent that covers nearly every implementation of this idea, so long as it follows a very broad framework (that is likely to be used by anyone trying to acheive this idea).

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[Theaetetus]

I think the complaint here is that there is nothing in those flow charts that reveal how they plan to accomplish this. They have provided many very broad and generic requirements, but they don't reveal any nuts and bolts. The devil's in the details with a system this complex. The result is that no one skilled in programming could take this patent and learn anything about how to make this "invention."

Oh, I don't know about that. With a good flow chart, I think a decent programmer can come up with an implementation of the algorithm.

Conversely, many people could run afoul of this patent by making a myriad of different implementations that follow a basic framework.

For example, from figure 4, "Generate a model information associated with the text", in figure 5 "Analyze the text for a contextual cue", or from figure 6 "Analyze the second image for auxilary information." All of these are very general and provide no real details to indicate the actual "how" to make this work.

Well, yeah, but there's also the specification discussing those steps. Additionally, if I give you, a carpenter, an instruction to fasten two boards together, that's very general and provides no real details... But you can probably come up with a dozen different ways to do so, including nails, screws, glue, dovetail joints, etc. If my overall furniture design for a combination couch/toilet is novel and nonobvious, why shouldn't I be able to claim any trivial variation of the design? Or conversely, why should you get to claim you don't infringe because you used Phillips screws rather than flathead screws?

Given these figures, Microsoft is claiming an incredibly broad patent that covers nearly every implementation of this idea, so long as it follows a very broad framework (that is likely to be used by anyone trying to acheive this idea).

And if their idea is novel and nonobvious, then they should get a claim to cover nearly every implementation. Mind you, this doesn't mean the idea is novel or nonobvious, and a lot of time, those claims get significantly narrowed before the patent is ever issued. But, if, for example, you come up with a working method for faster than light communication, why shouldn't you get a claim that covers such a method, whether it's done in hardware or software, runs Windows or Linux, written in C or COBOL, etc.?

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[reve_etrange]

The purpose of patents is to give inventors a limited monopoly on their specific invention, method or process in exchange for disclosure. It is not to reserve ideas or functionality. Just saying "create an information model" is nothing like enough. You can't own the idea of "create an information model," although you might be able to own a particular "information model" if it is novel and nonobvious, etc.

To use your example, if I were to invent and patent an ansible which employs quantum entanglement, your ansible employing latent human telepathy is non-infringing. You can't patent "the ansible," only a specific method for realizing one.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[udippel]

Yep. But is has been patented (or just not), so your argument is rather futile in this respect.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[reve_etrange]

You are unclear on the concept of the patent. No invention or inventor is "deserving" of a patent. An inventor granted a patent enters into a social contract in which the society/government agrees to enforce monopoly use rights in exchange for disclosure of the covered invention. It's a pragmatic arrangement which seeks to prevent inventions being held as secrets and eventually forgotten, nothing more.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[oxdas]

Oh, I don't know about that. With a good flow chart, I think a decent programmer can come up with an implementation of the algorithm.

The inventive step here is the how, not the what. If Microsoft was granted a patent on one of the implementations, I would be fine with that. Instead, Microsoft was granted a patent on a very general, obvious, process flow, with all the inventive steps represented as black boxes that they can fill with anything they choose.

Well, yeah, but there's also the specification discussing those steps. Additionally, if I give you, a carpenter, an instruction to fasten two boards together, that's very general and provides no real details... But you can probably come up with a dozen different ways to do so, including nails, screws, glue, dovetail joints, etc. If my overall furniture design for a combination couch/toilet is novel and nonobvious, why shouldn't I be able to claim any trivial variation of the design? Or conversely, why should you get to claim you don't infringe because you used Phillips screws rather than flathead screws?

Are you suggesting that the idea of fastening together two boards is patentable subject matter? If someone invents a novel and non-obvious way of fastening boards together, I think they deserve a patent, but only on their implementation.

In this case, there are non-trivial variations. The hard work, the inventive steps, are left as black boxes in this patent. The difficulty in implementing this idea is not in the process flow, but in the "analysis" and "models." In your couch/toilet idea, should you also get to own all non-trivial variations? In this patent, Microsoft does.

And if their idea is novel and nonobvious, then they should get a claim to cover nearly every implementation. Mind you, this doesn't mean the idea is novel or nonobvious, and a lot of time, those claims get significantly narrowed before the patent is ever issued. But, if, for example, you come up with a working method for faster than light communication, why shouldn't you get a claim that covers such a method, whether it's done in hardware or software, runs Windows or Linux, written in C or COBOL, etc.?

Nobody should be able to patent the concept of "faster than light communication." The implementation can be patented, in any form, but that has nothing to do with this patent. Microsoft has not patented any implementation, it has patented a very reasonable process flow for acheiving a wide variety of implementations. This patent would apply whether it extracts keywords from the page or whether it uses complex machine learning algorithms to analyze the text. They are trying to patent the idea of turning print media into images in as broad a stroke as possible.

I am sure this patent will be scaled back, but only after someone has paid millions of dollars to fight it. This patent does nothing to "promote the progress of Science", it is a roadblock.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[Theaetetus]

The purpose of patents is to give inventors a limited monopoly on their specific invention, method or process in exchange for disclosure. It is not to reserve ideas or functionality. Just saying "create an information model" is nothing like enough. You can't own the idea of "create an information model," although you might be able to own a particular "information model" if it is novel and nonobvious, etc.

What is this "nothing like enough" and where do you find it in the statutes? If you're referring to the fact that "create an information model" has been done before, then sure. But if we're talking about something that hasn't been done before, such as FTL communication, then as long as you disclose enough detail to enable one of ordinary skill in the art to make and use the invention, why shouldn't you be able to claim a method for FTL communication, without going in depth on the specifics of quantum entanglement?

To use your example, if I were to invent and patent an ansible which employs quantum entanglement, your ansible employing latent human telepathy is non-infringing. You can't patent "the ansible," only a specific method for realizing one.

If my ansible includes every part that's in your claimed ansible, then I do infringe. So, the question is how narrowly you have to claim your ansible to be patentable over the prior art.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[oxdas]

After re-reading, I didn't mean "print media," but rather digital text. Too bad there isn't an edit option.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[s.petry]

I think this is easier to dismiss with prior art. Translations exist, and have existed for thousands of years in both written and oral traditions. Software translations have also been written for decades. What Billy is trying to claim is that he wants to patent a translation. If you translate to a summary, it is still a translation. If you translate an unknown title to a current equivalent, it's still a translation.

I have to add that an algorithm is math and math is not supposed to be patentable. There should be no concession on this rule, yet people continue to kow-tow to people who believe that they should own _everything_ and charge you rent.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[reve_etrange]

I personally agree that algorithms should not be patentable. I also think that software is sufficiently protected by copyrights and in any event I agree also with recent scholarly work against intellectual property in general.

However, say we provisionally accept the mainstream legal view that algorithms are patentable so long as the patent is really 1) non-obvious, 2) novel and 3) describes actual methods to achieve functionality. I think that then it's not possible for a patent to fail tests 1 or 2 if it fails test 3, because one cannot specify the novelty or obviousness of a method if no method is given. So I do think the "prior art" test is secondary to the "is this an invention" test, and the current patent isn't an invention, just a list of features a hypothetical invention might contain.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[s.petry]

I don't agree and simply think we "accept" people's will to hold power instead of arguing with basic logic. Let me give a few examples. A pressure gauge was patented as a hardware invention. Other gauges, such as a Speedometer, went through similar patents. When we create a software patent for a gauge we are not creating anything new, we are making a representation of a prior physical device that was previously patented. This doubles the duration of a patent in practice, ensuring monopolization for twice the intended duration. We have seed sorting machines and vegetable sorting machines that were patented. In software, we implement various methods of sorting which mimic what we have previously allowed to be patented. Nearly everything we have in software is an adaptation of something we have done in hardware.

To me, the logic is simple. Software patents were initially denied because almost all software patents are re-implementations of what we have allowed patents for in physical machinery.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[reve_etrange]

I mostly agree with you; my points is just that even under the current mainstream legal view (CMLV), it seems this particular patent doesn't really describe an invention at all, just features for a hypothetical one. Again, this should have disqualified this patent even under the CMLV.

I do believe however that software patents were originally denied as mathematics, i.e. because you can't patent the abstract, rather than because of prior art. To take your sorting example, there isn't really a prior-art comparison between physical sorting (based on size, shape, etc.) and sorting algorithms such as qsort, Heap Sort, Merge Sort, etc. Patents don't cover specific functions, just specific ways of implementing those functions (again, according to the CMLV). If I got a patent on qsort, it wouldn't prohibit you from using or patenting Heap Sort.

And yes, most of the software patents we see are clearly invalid under the CMLV, but the USPTO is extremely lax and declarations of invalidity require costly and lengthy legal interventions.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[s.petry]

Seems like we agree that it should not happen. I blame the shitty way the USPTO is handling things on the people with money bribing officials into and in offices, and the populace being both dumb enough to let it happen and fooled into believing there is nothing wrong with it. I read a speech given in the 1800s regarding copyright law, and it is astounding that the same arguments then are still around today. Not because Copyrights and Patents are good for Society, but because it makes a select few people a shitload of money.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[reve_etrange]

It's completely ridiculous that the USPTO is supposed to self-fund via fees. There is a fee to file and another (the largest) to re-examine, which to my mind creates a conflict of interest. I also don't understand what could be going through the examiners' minds when they approve all these absurdly obvious patents, as well as ones (like this one) which just don't describe any actual processes. I mean, what the hell is "create an information model" supposed to cover?

The situation with copyright is probably going to stay shitty for a while longer (before, I think, eventually reverting to the historical norm of no special protection from individual copying), but I do have some hope that the patent situation will improve because of how seriously it is impinging innovation. Patents are definitely a major reason why I probably wont try to develop any of my academic work into a business.

And that's not to mention the absurdity of the treble damages for willfull infringement. It actually incentives us never to look at any patent, thus neutering the supposed benefit that patents provide.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[s.petry]

The situation with copyright is probably going to stay shitty for a while longer (before, I think, eventually reverting to the historical norm of no special protection from individual copying), but I do have some hope that the patent situation will improve because of how seriously it is impinging innovation.

I'm a realist, and have no such hope, at least not while we have a Political class of people holding nearly every political and judicial office. Big players that can afford it have think tanks doing nothing but submitting patents on "ideas" and legal teams figuring out how to make them pass the poor process we have for patent review.

The only way it changes, is to get rid of the Political class. Since the same class controls media and manipulates the public, it will take quite a bit to fix it. I'm referring to a revolt or military coup in the US as the likely change. The corruption is so entrenched it's hard to see any other method working.

Re:No algorithm should mean no patent

[TechNeilogy]

A friend of mine and I invented the MP3 player decades before the first one was ever produced. We thought: wouldn't it be cool to have a pocket-sized, totally electronic device which could store and play our favorite songs? We even made a modelling clay mockup that was more realistic and descriptive than most patent diagrams. To bad we didn't contact the patent office... On a brighter note: I don't think the idea is totally bad; providing a context for a work of literature can make it more interesting and appealing, and can make first contact with it more rewarding. However, having been a victim of some experimental "new media" education back in the olden days, I can confirm that such things need to be carefully crafted in order to keep the experience from disolving into easily forgotten glitz.

Prior Art

[Anonymous Coward]

He basically describes OCR to read the text (mostly cancelled claims), and then piping the textual description to a video synthesis system. I'm not aware of video synthesis, but image synthesis and composition already exists, and has for several years. For example: Sketch2Photo shows a similar concept that can be used to dismiss a good chunk of the very few claims left in this application.

Re:Prior Art

[Zontar The Mindless]

Looks like this has potential. Thanks for the link.

Re:Prior Art

[Bucc5062]

I checked out the sketch2Photo site...Amazing! To think you can draw an idea, present it to this program and out pops a photo?

To get this out, I am in agreement that there should be no patent award to Bill. When I read the summary my first thought was "This is the beginning of the end to imagination". I feel their "idea" diminishes the requirement that children learn to use their imagination, to create a place, scene, or person and Bill's idea would jsut take any effort away.

What I see in a program like S2P as a tool in exercising imagination. A kid could draw a Unicorn playing with a Bear by a lake and this program puts depth to the effort. The only concern I would have is that something like this could impact Art. Not sure how, but I get this feeling it changes what is Art and what is the creative process.

I was just gonna say

[dutchwhizzman]

The first thing this will be used for is going to be porn, not Shakespeare. The disturbing thing is that it will be used for all sorts of porn "frowned upon" as well. How legal is this generated porn and can the creator of the application be held liable for generating the content?

Re:I was just gonna say

[JaredOfEuropa]

How is that disturbing? I prefer society's perverts getting their jollies from auto-generated virtual kiddie porn, to them getting it from porn produced using actual children. One could argue that access to virtual porn will fuel their desire for the real thing, but virtual porn might also be sufficient to satisfy their needs so that they will no longer need the real deal.

Re:I was just gonna say

[Opportunist]

Unfortunately, people tend to dislike the idea of having their life ended prematurely, so it is very unlikely that the average child molester will come forward to collect his bullet. Since precrime doesn't really exist, you have to wait for someone to actually commit a crime before you can convict someone.

And if virtual kiddy porn can keep just one from going for the real deal, it's worth it.

Re:I was just gonna say

[sbjornda]

The first thing this will be used for is going to be porn, not Shakespeare.

Hey, it's not "either-or".

HAMLET to OPHELIA: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA: No, my lord.
HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.
HAMLET: Do you think I meant CoUNTry matters?
OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.

--
.nosig

Re:I was just gonna say

[mendax]

The first thing this will be used for is going to be porn, not Shakespeare.

Hey, it's not "either-or".

HAMLET to OPHELIA: Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
OPHELIA: No, my lord.
HAMLET: I mean, my head upon your lap?
OPHELIA: Ay, my lord.
HAMLET: Do you think I meant CoUNTry matters?
OPHELIA: I think nothing, my lord.
HAMLET: That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.

-- .nosig

Oh yes! There is lots of this porn of a sort in Shakespeare. Henry V comes to mind now, the scene between Katherine and her nurse that is spoken entirely in French. The nurse says that she knows some English and proceeds to amaze Katherine with her terribly mispronounced English words for various common body parts and items. When she gets to the part where Katherine asks her nurse for the word for the article of clothing she is wearing the nurse says "gown" but pronounces it like the French word for that thing that starts with a C, ends in a T, means "pussy", and is NOT a cat.

I guess the book-burning hyper-Christian book banners didn't read Shakespeare to understand that The Bard's plays can contain content that is quite vile by their standards. Hell, Romeo and Juliet contains teenaged sex. I guess Shakespeare is less crude than any ordinary romance novel.

Shakespeare, as a master of the language, loved to twist it in anyway he could for effect. He would have thoroughly enjoyed George Carlin's line from "The Seven Things You Can't Say on Television": "It's okay to prick your finger but never finger your pr*ck."

There's An App For That

[Anonymous Coward]

https://marketplace.firefox.com/app/hangman-1

I come not to praise Gates

[Infestedkudzu]

Just an opinion, but don't we use Shakespeare and it's ilk to increase reasoning skills? Much Ado About Nothing is no funnier than any given sitcom out there. Isn't it the language gymnastics that give it's benefit? Seems like chewing it for them just works around testing.

Re:I come not to praise Gates

[Belial6]

That is the dirty secret of classic literature. Most of it just isn't that good.

I don't think the point of making kids read Shakespeare is to increase reasoning skill. I think that they are made to read it because the people assigning it think it is great literature. They assume that it is their own failing that they don't find it very good, so they either work hard at convincing themselves it is good, or they just fake it. It is like the Emperor's New Clothes.

Catastrophically awful idea

[RogueyWon]

This proposal just makes my flesh crawl. Why are we so afraid of the idea that some classic works of literature (just like classics in the field of art or film) require a degree of diligence and attention to get the most out of them? Why do we object so strongly to the idea of teaching children the value of deferred please; that hard work and effort now can produce greater rewards down the line?

It's not just a problem in the arts. If we teach the next generation that all study should be easy, quick and fun, then how do we get over the fact that a learning lot of the science that underpins our current standard of living is none of those things.

"Sit down, shut up and read" might not be patentable as a teaching method due to prior art (though part of me wouldn't be surprised if somebody tried), but it strikes me as far more useful than the technology described in TFA.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[SuricouRaven]

Because hard work down the line doesn't translate into higher exam scores today.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[Sockatume]

The proposal isn't actually about literature; it's explicitly about textbooks. I dare say it'd have a really hard time with literature because important contextual information is unlikely to be held in the text snippet that it's supposed to visualise. For example it would be pretty trivial to put together an illustration of "1000 men storm the river whatevs" given that it's an abstract, but "What light through yonder window breaks?" takes a lot more foreknowledge.

I suspect the original intention was for them to be able to programatically generate those little illustrative videos you used to see on Encarta articles. Most of the claims are trashed so whatever the original patent was, it was quite a bit more substantial.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[Sockatume]

Nope, no it isn't, this is what I get for reading the claims first.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[slimdave]

I completely agree, but the point of the patent is not to do something more effectively, or in any way better, but to protect your idea so that you can make money from it.

I guess that people stopped making money from printing unadorned works of Shakespeare quite some time ago, and have to find new ways of doing so. This just appears to be a way of linking existing OCR technology with book lookup and thence to multimedia -- none of them innovative, but the combination being a potential money maker.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[Chris Mattern]

To be fair, Shakespeare's plays aren't *meant* to be read. They're meant to be performed. So seeing a performance of the play is actually quite appropriate.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[Zontar The Mindless]

"Fun" != "satisfying".

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[RogueyWon]

Yes, point taken on the plays.

I'd also take issue with the phrase "make Shakespeare less boring". Most of Shakespeare's work (and I will make an exception for a couple of the romcoms, which I do feel are a bit crap) are anything but boring.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Except that, taught well, almost all academia is fun and easy to learn. That includes the 'science that underpins our current standard of living' - at least, the stuff I was taught in medical school and whilst studying computer science.

The idea that education and learning is a penance is precisely why so many children are turned off to it. Your ideas are antiquated, to the days of chalk boards and quills - this is the age of amazing interactive technology. Capturing the imagination of the young and using technology to aid that is a wonderful thing.

Of course we can stick to 'sit down, shut up and read' but I don't think it's a good idea.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[gstoddart]

Because hard work down the line doesn't translate into higher exam scores today.

But it will translate into a generation of children getting out into the workforce who can't do any actual work because they've been coddled and who have been educated in such a way as to maximize standardized tests.

And then we'll be really screwed. Pay the cost of educating them now, or pay the cost of living with that as your workforce later.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[argStyopa]

The problem is that in our 'classless' society, we seem to believe that EVERYONE needs to be some sort of intellectual, enjoying reading Shakespeare or knowing the dates of important things in history. I mean, EVERYONE should go to college, right?

The fact is, of course, 95% of everyone could get along very nicely never doing either. In fact, we'd be far better off if we somehow 'decided' that knowing how to do plumbing, how to farm, or how to be an electrician was somehow just as 'valued' as Shakespeare?

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Original Romeo and Juliet Balcony Scene:
But soft, what light through yonder window breaks?
It is the east and Juliet is the sun!
Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon,
Who is already sick and pale with grief (5)
That thou her maid art far more fair than she.

Translation:
Look at that lady up there. That bitch be fly!

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[tlhIngan]

The problem is that in our 'classless' society, we seem to believe that EVERYONE needs to be some sort of intellectual, enjoying reading Shakespeare or knowing the dates of important things in history. I mean, EVERYONE should go to college, right?

The fact is, of course, 95% of everyone could get along very nicely never doing either. In fact, we'd be far better off if we somehow 'decided' that knowing how to do plumbing, how to farm, or how to be an electrician was somehow just as 'valued' as Shakespeare?

So you would agree then that 95% of people don't give a crap about computers and just want to get stuff done? Or why they're eagerly snapping up tablets and smartphones because they're easier to use and less of a bother?

Remember, said electrician or plumber doesn't care about Shakespeare, and they don't care about computers either - other than what they need to know in order to fill out an invoice. And how to use it to get information, recurrent training and how to stay in touch with others. And is just as likely to care about GPL, FOSS and other stuff like freedom as much as they care about what Hamlet is about? Or even stuff about copyrights and DRM. As long as that Blu-ray movie plays in their player, it's good enough. Or that they can sit in front of an Xbox or Playstation and have a few games with buddies.

It's the same way all around.

Oh, and Shakespeare is more interesting when you read it in the original Klingon, I'd say.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[The Cat]

eagerly snapping up tablets and smartphones

Marketing phrase detected. Credibility instantly and permanently drops to zero.

Have a nice day.

Re:Catastrophically awful idea

[Knuckles]

Good for me. I was once afraid that I'd become dispensable when I get old (i.e., any time now). Not anymore, the way we are going I'll be able to choose my jobs until I die just because I can read.

I used their patent to learn using Windows

[ctrl-alt-canc]

Learning to use Windows is quite boring, so I used their invention to make the task most interesting. I scanned the textbook, but the system returned me a boring image, with the pixels of the very same colour. I guess it is suggesting me to think about the sky or the sea, but I do not understand why...

Since when has Shakespeare been boring???

[fuzzybunny]

Misleading headline aside, Shakespeare is hilarious.

Violence, sex, creative insults galore, betrayal, incest, murder, sword fights, pork sword fights, ghosts, and more invented words than you can shake a pork sword at.

It is awesome and even suggesting that the short attention span squad deserves being pandered to is borderline criminal.

Re:Since when has Shakespeare been boring???

[redcaboodle]

Try Ben Jonson instead. You'll lever look back.

Discussions like this always make me remember my last English teacher at school. It's only literature if there is a four letter word in each sentence. He apologized to us for making us read A midsummer night's dream. When some of us went to see Volpone on a class trip, he announced it as some play by a guy like Shakespeare. I've always wondered what would happen if he actually read something by Poe - his head would probably explode.

Re:Since when has Shakespeare been boring???

[fuzzybunny]

Hey man, Catullus 16 is one of the classics. :D

Re:Since when has Shakespeare been boring???

[Nidi62]

The best adaptation of Shakespeare that I ever saw was Baz Luhrman's Romeo+Juliet. The juxtaposition of the original dialogue in a modern day setting is slightly jarring at first, but then makes it much easier to understand the language than simply reading it or watching a film set in the correct time frame. I actually really enjoyed it, especially the opening sequence and the pool hall scene. Now, the Shakespeare Tavern here in Atlanta put on a pretty good performance of Taming of the Shrew(but of course it is a comedy not a tragedy), but any Shakespeare movie with Kenneth Branaugh needs to die a horrible death. That man overacts way too much.

Re:Since when has Shakespeare been boring???

[91degrees]

Since schools started teaching it.

Schools never teach what the plays are about. Romeo and Juliet contains fights, murder, wordplay, and a forbidden romance. Macbeth is actually a pretty tense horror story, where the enormity of the murder constantly haunts the main characters. But teachers are so busy disecting every single line that the actual stoy gets lost.

Re:Since when has Shakespeare been boring???

[Princeofcups]

Misleading headline aside, Shakespeare is hilarious.

Violence, sex, creative insults galore, betrayal, incest, murder, sword fights, pork sword fights, ghosts, and more invented words than you can shake a pork sword at.

You forgot the fart jokes.

Re:Since when has Shakespeare been boring???

[couchslug]

"It is awesome and even suggesting that the short attention span squad deserves being pandered to is borderline criminal."

The short attention span squad deserve to be ignored, with the exception of job training so they can be useful drones.

Re:Since when has Shakespeare been boring???

[dlingman]

It's not. At least not when read in the original Klingon.

Ok, attention-span might be a target problem

[jdagius]

... but the proposed gadget will likely make the problem worse

Literal Adaptation

[gsslay]

I used this autogenerated video already for my study of Shakespeare's Hamlet.

That's how I know about his brave fight against a sea monster called Fortune, despite having come under heavy fire from arrows and sling shots.

Strange that they always cut that bit out of the film adaptations, I thought it was the most exciting part of the play, even though it didn't seem to make much sense.

Re:Literal Adaptation

[Miamicanes]

No! No! The kangaroo was at the Last Supper!

You don't want an artist, you want a bloody PHOTOGRAPHER!!!

I tried to read the patent

[Chrisq]

... and it could definitely be improved with some pictures and captions

Titles this should be Beta Tested on...

[Aaron B Lingwood]

Fifty Shades of Grey

Prior art already exists

[kruach aum]

It's called "imagination."

Re:Headline

[Mikkeles]

Besides, this patent just describes storyboarding, but on a computer!.

Re:Prior art again Bill!

[flyneye]

I'd have settled for Key Comics ancient releases of Shakespeares tales.
Not a new idea Bill. If you had the patent, you'd probably sue a comic book company for that. Shame on you, now go away and stay out of my news.

Well, I think it's a good idea.

[RamiKro]

After all, even typography is all about making text more readable and beautiful. And that's not too objectionable unless you're an MLA submission committee. I'm sure there was a time when spaces, capital letters and punctuations were debatable as crutches.

I would personally find use in an algorithm that highlights nouns or verbs to facilitate speeder reading.
Another idea I have is an eye tracker in an eBook reader that will pick up on you getting stuck on a word and will sound it out for you to hear. If you're still stuck, it could pop up a definition and a thesaurus.

For little kids and with enough computing power, you can have a Dora animation to do it where appropriate. For all I care you can have clippy too. That much is definitely within Gates' desire.

So, overall not a bad idea.

Is it just me ...

[NikeHerc]

or are these guys trying to reduce knowledge to idiocy?

Re:Is it just me ...

[bluegutang]

I think they're trying to eliminate imagination and creativity. Why bother to imagine a battle or love affair in your head, when you can press a button and the computer will show you what it looked like?

Re:Is it just me ...

[udippel]

I don't reply to ACs.

Re:Is it just me ...

[Belial6]

If you had any real imagination, you wouldn't be leaning on someone else's writing as a crutch. Why bother imagining a battle or love affair when you can open a book and be spoon fed the story.

The complain that video removes imagination, while implying that writing does not is a big helping of "My shade of grey is better than your shade of grey".

The internet is for porn

[spectrokid]

Brilliant! Instant porn versions of all masterpieces! My kingdom to be hung like a horse!

It doesn't sound too bad

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll try and stay awake.

Hey, is this a kissing book?

From Microsoft - the masters of great UI

[Eternal Vigilance]

Given how shoddy Microsoft's interface to computing has been over the decades, I'm nauseated by the idea of the same people creating - and if this patent is granted, controlling - an interface to (some subset of) reality.

Though it's ironic that people who used to insist text was the only interface the world needed and anyone who wanted more was mentally feeble are now basing a patent application on their ground-breaking insight that text is sometimes limiting.

I do look forward to all the hilarious ways this latest variation of the intelligent PDA will screw up.

"It looks like you're trying to murder your father and marry your mother. Would you like help?"

p.s. The appropriate solution to students finding textbooks boring is better textbooks and a society that demands quality education for its people. What Gates and Myhrvold are attempting to provide is the educational equivalent of an energy drink - instead of true health and fitness.

p.p.s. Knowing how difficult the process is Gates and Myhrvold are attempting to claim they can implement, I'm surprised TFA didn't include

BRIEF DESCRIPTION OF THE FIGURES

[0011] FIG. 1 and then a miracle occurs.

Re:Headline

[poetmatt]

I don't even understand how someone thinks a patent is going to improve anything? That's not even what patents are for.

This has Microsoft Songsmith fail all over it

[howardd21]

I can only imagine the carnage this will do...ala songsmith another genius idea to generate art forms of some sort. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kxqMpGAL3I

Sounds like a dumb idea ...

[gstoddart]

Yes, make it so kids can't read a book without a smartphone to keep them entertained.

Our kids can apparently barely read now, and writing with a pen is becoming something they don't know how to do.

I don't think we need a room full of kids on smart phones scanning Shakespeare to get entertaining images. We need a room full of kids who can actually sit through a class without using their smartphone, and who can actually read and write.

I don't see this improving that any. This is just more shiny stuff to make sure the kids grow up with ADHD and can't function without a smartphone.

Re:Sounds like a dumb idea ...

[The Cat]

Somewhere in America, a father is grabbing the phone out of the hands of his teenage daughter and hurling it over the house into a flood control channel.

The entire neighborhood is giving him a standing ovation as he walks back into the house in slow motion.

Re:Headline

[arth1]

I don't even understand how someone thinks a patent is going to improve anything? That's not even what patents are for.

Correct. The purpose of patents is to make some people money by preventing others from making money on the same thing.
It works from the assumption that this stimulates invention as the patent holder will use the extra income to finance his next invention.

Next patent

[chepati]

for pre-chewing food.

Have we become so lazy that now we can't be bothered to read the text and visualize it ourselves, but have to rely on a computer algorithm to generate a video of its interpretation of the said text? This is the magic of the written word, that it stimulates our brain to build an entire world and populate it with locales and characters, to breathe life into a seemingly dead medium. The intellectual effort is the exercise that keeps our brain fit, that enables it to improve. You take that away and you're left with just a passive observation, ie a movie.

Species this lazy does not deserve to reproduce and consume resources.

Stop right there

[gx5000]

SO we're hanging around Spielberg and Locas I see. DOn't stop to consider that these works lose much after being "tranmogriphied", but this could also be used to make MSNBC sound like FOX news at the touch of a button. No thanks. It's no longer classical literature once it's been that badly abridged.

Hold on a second...

[king neckbeard]

Is he trying to get a patent on using your imagination to turn words into movies (on a smartphone)? I'm pretty sure that there's prior art for this in everybody who has ever read narrative fiction, and a lot of incomplete yet relevant prior art in the oral tradition as well.

Re:Copyright Violation

[gx5000]

The chance of this being used to censor and rewrite materials that some find offensive is staggering....

Don't give the schools any more ideas

[Joe_Dragon]

Just wait for it having to buy the book + a school cell phone plan and school phone + with apps. At the high college prices.

We need to get rid of the over priced books that come with online testing sites as well.

Re:Headline

[__aaltlg1547]

The computer is supposed to do the storyboarding. It hasn't been automated before. What's missing is the WHOLE PROGRAM. The patent office needs to start demanding working code for software patents. If you don't have working code, you don't have an invention, just an idea that you might eventually some day years from now turn into an invention -- if it's even an invention.

These devices will be great for a time in 20 years when kids don't bother to learn to read and can't even listen to a story but must have everything shown to them in video clips. In short, it's for the brave new world of subhumans.

Re:Headline

[Oligonicella]

Utterly wrong. It provides the patent creator with the possibility of income instead of rip-off. It's not *extra* income, it's income.

Re:Prior art again Bill!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

It did strange things, to my guitar building textbook.

I think it may have been the phrase "Ebony Stiffeners".

Re:Headline

[king neckbeard]

No, the purpose of patents is to stimulate invention, or more specifically, to "promote the progress." The legal monopoly is the means by which the patent system tries to reach this goal. And no, there's no specific intention of a next invention, although that may be a benefit in some cases. If that were the case, we could just much more efficiently hand out research grants to promising researchers with promising ideas. We can do that already.

Novel?

[Qzukk]

I go to look at the patent and over 90% of the claims were canceled (seriously there are 39 claims left, numbered 397-453, with gaps in the middle). What's left is basically what xtranormal used to do, with OCR bolted on the front end.

Re:Headline

[tinkerton]

And Shakespeare isn't boring really. People just think it probably would be.

Creating laziness and ilitteratcy

[gravis777]

(and people who have trouble spelling ilitteratcy).

So, if this comes out, students no longer have an incentive to read - they just take their smart phone to class, take a picture of their books, and Bing returns youtube videos? Thanks a lot, Bill Gates, for killing reading and reading comprehension!

Re:Creating laziness and ilitteratcy

[jetkust]

Having a better understanding of what you are reading does not create laziness and illiteracy. It creates better understanding, which more likely will lead to more interest in reading.

Re:Creating laziness and ilitteratcy

[udippel]

Hmm. You don't fully convince me here.
Of course, understanding what you read makes a huge difference. But Shakespeare - as an example - is not exactly something that lives from 'understanding'. It is not fantastic as plot as such. 'Understanding' the plot can easily distract from the intention. Man, we are not discussing technology here, but arts. The old Rembrandt is not 'understood' when you point out that it is a somewhat foggy image of a man with a hat. And the Tempest isn't a realistic voyage of a sailor who gets caught in a storm.
I for one wished our schools were much more active in the non-business-oriented layer in between, the one that creates a deep link with arts.

Re:Newthing

[arth1]

This needs pretty advanced natural language processing to work.

Simple word matching would be a good start.

The Audobon member proudly showed her his collection of tits. "I had a blue footed booby too, but the pussy ate it."

What could possibly go wrong?

Just another stop on the elevator

[Lawrence_Bird]

to the bottom which is US education system - led by the "we must fix it!" crowd. I suspect most adults, let alone high school students, could not pass an exam given to 8th graders a century ago. This notion that everything must be easy to learn and nothing ever boring is the most evil kind of fantasy.

Translate to a picture book... On a phone

[The Grim Reefer]

This is a great fucking idea. So instead of teaching kids to read and comprehend they can use their phone to translate text into a picture book. Why not just translate it to SMS:

2 be, o not 2 be: dat iz d ?:

wethR 'tis nobler n d mind 2 suffer

d slings & arrows of mad GL,

o 2 tAk arms agAnst a C of SOS,

& by opposing nd dem? 2 die: 2 slp;

n mo; & by a slp 2 sA we nd

d hart-ache & d thou natRL shocks

dat flesh iz heir to, 'tis a nd goal

Re:Translate to a picture book... On a phone

[udippel]

Wow. And I have no mod points. :-(

Re:Translate to a picture book... On a phone

[Belial6]

You joke, but knowing how to decipher SMS speak into regular English is a more useful skill than learning to translate Old English into regular English. Shakespeare is an Old English equivalent of Southpark. Entertaining in it's time. Loaded with low brow comedy. Frequently carries a message. Just not that important in the long run.

Re:Prior art again Bill!

[Notabadguy]

It's not prior art that concerns me, it's the intentional rewriting of history.

History 101, post Bill-Gates Video Learning:

Final Exam Essay: Describe the Battle of Waterloo:

In 1815, an Imperial French army under the command of Emperor Jean-Claude Van Damm was defeated by the armies of the Dirrrty South, comprised of a coalition of Lil Jon and East Side Boyz, Britney Spears, and Leonidas' 300. Emperor Van Damm's Universal Soldiers blitzkrieged the 300, who's phalanx withstood repeated attacks until Lil Jon got crunk up in there and broke through and skeeted up the French lines. Britney Spears' forces then hit that baby one more time.

Citation: Video textbook.

What makes this less boring, exactly?

[Michael_gr]

So, there's some boring textbook, and you scan a line, and some shitty algorithm (probably based on Bing search technology) generates some sort of vaguely-related video. How does that make the book any less boring? Videos are not inherently interesting - they are only interesting if they are made interesting by a human creator. This invention would just add a boring video to the boring text. What little interest can be extracted from this will be derived from the process's failures and unintended hilarious misinterpretations. They might as well try to patent "doodling on the margins" for all the good this is going to do.

God forbid ...

[Rambo Tribble]

... the little dears should be required to develop an imagination. This is a giant leap forward in producing human automatons.

Obviates the need for reading

[whizbang77045]

You don't need to be able to read. Your computer will do it for you.

Re:Headline

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

This is what bothers me -- the patent lists "algorithms" and "heuristics", those magical things.

Except the software **is** the dancing bear of invention here, not the goddamn cell phone camera with wireless connection.

They might as well replace "heuristic" with "human sits there and quickly assembles a scene."

And when someone invents a much better algorithm, are they screwed?

Lost in Translation

[midifarm]

What's lost here is the poetry. You don't read Shakespeare simply for the story, you read it for the eloquence of the writer. Cyrano de Bergerac would be whittled down to Roxanne. This is a bad idea. Why are we always trying to dumb down everything? Let him make the product and let it fail, but don't give him a patent.

rewriting history

[Locutus]

It's been said many times that Bill Gates likes to rewrite history to fit his reality, this sounds like yet another avenue for him to do so. If they ever figure it out and produce something then expect lots of very interesting book reviews in schools of the Microsoft employees kids forced to use it.

LoB

Re:rewriting history

[retchdog]

Unfortunately, it might not be just the children of Microsoft employees... http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/answer-sheet/wp/2013/07/15/bill-gates-expands-influence-and-money-into-higher-education/

Bad patent system.

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

With certain things, the devil is in the details. I think this is one of those. I could patent "method to bring a person to Mars and back" but there are a lot lot lot of steps between writing "put them on rocket, send, have them come back" on a piece of paper and getting Chris Rock there and back safely (why Chris Rock? why not?).

Remember for Apollo, they had a few ways of getting people to the moon and back. What if someone had patented "method to get someone to the moon, somehow, someway" then waited for someone to Idunno, actually do it. Think of all the actual work involved, the Mercury/Gemini programs that were stepping stones, the new materials, the money, the build out of the space centers in Houston and Florida (pork barrel spending at its finest) but i could have put a wrench in the works by having some overworked underpaid patent clerk that stamped some piece of paper that said "method to convey someone to the moon and back".

Wrong Premise

[Kozar_The_Malignant]

Shakespeare is not boring; far from it. If your language skills aren't up to it, study.

Re:Anti-Intellectual bullshit

[HaZardman27]

Before you make blanket statements about communities like Reddit, I would recommend you check out some subreddits like /r/programming or /r/compsci. Slashdot is not as great as you think it is.

A brave new world

[HaZardman27]

A world in which technology takes over the job of your imagination. I used to read things and create still and moving pictures within my mind, but soon my phone will be able to do it for me!

Re:Anti-Intellectual bullshit

[jetkust]

Yes, you are intelligent because you like Shakespeare. Keep telling yourself that...

I would love to see the view for...

[dskoll]

You blocks, you stones, you worse than senseless things! (Julius Caesar)

'Zounds, sir, you're robb'd; for shame, put on your gown; Your heart is burst, you have lost half your soul; Even now, now, very now, an old black ram Is topping your white ewe. Arise, arise; Awake the snorting citizens with the bell, Or else the devil will make a grandsire of you: Arise, I say. (Othello)

What could possibly go wrong? :)

Really?

[Jmac217]

What an awful idea. Microsoft has really hit rock bottom haven't they...

We already have these...

[HockeyPuck]

They're called Teachers. I took British Literature back in high school and in college. In high school, I had a dynamic teacher that made Shakespeare exciting and cause for much classroom participation and discussion.

Later in college, the professor created a boring environment "delving into the meaning behind the meaning behind the meaning" of individual words and phrases that the classroom turned into a snoozefest.

   

Re:Headline

[Alumoi]

You mean when US kids won't be able to read, right?

Prior Art

[Rorgg]

This fellow from Stratford made Shakespeare not boring with live video depictions of his plays around 1600, give or take 15 years.

Autogenerating..

[djyrn3715]

I imagine auto generating video is more than linking previously created video based upon content? Seems to me that StudyBlue.com already does that. I'm trying to picture the auto-generated video and all I get in my head is an image of Max Headroom reading lines with some background images of Europe.

Gates and Myhrvold?

[Theaetetus]

Odd pairing, considering that Myhrvold is no longer with Microsoft, but, of course, runs Intellectual Ventures. Interestingly, this application isn't a continuation, and was filed in 2012.

That's not "engaged"

[holophrastic]

That's called disengaging. Holding a book and looking at your phone isn't being engaged in the book any more than holding the book was being engaged in the play.

It is possible to just not like something. It's perfectly ok to not like something. Stop giving me the same carp in a different format. I still don't like it.

Legal Document Applications?

[lubaciousd]

I wonder if an eventual goal of this fork of work is to expand to technical or legal documents? It seems like there could be a real can of worms opened when people cruising through EULAs and mortgages using the summary media generated. Who would be liable for a miscommunication?

I'd like a version in modern English

[peter303]

I get the gist of the plays, but only about 95% of the words. The 5% are either no longer used or changed meaning substantially.

Blasphemous.

[kheldan]

I find this whole idea to be utterly blasphemous and repugnant. For fuck's sake, you want people to be exposed to the works of Shakespeare? Go see a play! If they're more interested after that then they'll sit still to read the scripts later!

Re:Headline

[msobkow]

If this were even vaguely technically feasible, we would have great automatic language translation tools.

After all, if a computer could convert formats from textual descriptions to actual video footage, it would be trivial to do language conversion.

It's not.

This "patent" should be rejected because it's not been done, isn't being done, and probably won't be feasible for 20+ years.

Re:Words, words, words

[DexterIsADog]

Given the fact that automatic translations still frequently produce gibberish, i'm extremely skeptical that these "systems and methods" will produce anything helpfull to the student. However entertaining the endresult may be, i fear it will look more like a dadaist collage than a shakespearean play. As to the patent application: "I do know of these that therefore only are reputed wise for saying nothing.", as the Bard has it.

If it really did look like a "dadaist collage" then that would ALSO be valuable. A part of every child's education should include the surreal and iconoclastic. The Dada movement was extremely good at that. Also Andy Kaufman.

How else will people be able to process their experience when they happen on an old urinal in a museum exhibit?

R&J

[Ralph Spoilsport]

Romeo - yo! Romeo - why you such a dick?

Juliet, lissen beyotch, yer fam is like wack. I juss wanna make love to you babeeee! And we can commit sewer pipes! Yo! That'll teach those mofos ya can't stop luv! Buncha fuckin HATERS!

Does it come with Brawndo? Idiocracy, here we come

[bussdriver]

How about conducing some actual scientific studies and adding to mankind's understanding of the brain and learning instead of patents for baseless education tools.

I bet that such a device HARMS CHILDREN. If you can't read and imagine you are mentally crippled... Not just in school but especially in the so-called "real world." If you are entertained by fairly thoughtless disjointed animations distracting your reading then you have a really low IQ or you are a CS intrigued by complexity of replacing a team of disney animators with a spam filter AI.

Then teach how to find plot holes

[tepples]

Your beloved play does not hold up to cursory scrutiny.

If William Shakespeare's plays are as overrated as you claim, then high school literature teachers are doing their students a disservice in not showing them how to find plot holes like this.

Re:Then teach how to find plot holes

[bfandreas]

It's Romeo and juliet that is absolutely overrated. You will also need to put the plays into the historical context. Friedrich Schiller for instance had read and watched(IIRC even translated) a lot of Shakespeare. So he benefitted from another lifetime of experience. Both of them were showmen and also needed to get bums on seats. Both of them wrote stuff which was mainly entertaining but nevertheless noteworthy.

Just leave the theatre after Mercutio has died. It improves the play.

Re:Prior art again Bill!

[WheezyJoe]

until Lil Jon got crunk up in there and broke through and skeeted up the French lines. Britney Spears' forces then hit that baby one more time

LOL. Where are my mod points when I need them? :D

Shocking! And Unnecessary!

[mendax]

When I was in high school what I needed was "a good teacher" to help me over the rough bits of language. But as I got older I find I have very little trouble understanding Shakespeare when I have a good dictionary at hand to help me with the words, and that, my friends, is the only electronic help anyone needs.

Re: Pretenciousness hurts my head thingy

[Em Adespoton]

what is the point of language gymnastics, you can change the syntax all you want but the semantics are the same, why waste brain cells translating ancient english to modern english. Computers were invented to do all this mundane stuff for us, if a computer can imagine stuff for me too let it.

also this "invention"is the obvios precursor to the holodeck.

Without computer:
"Imagine a vast desert with a bird circling overhead, wind whistling through the dunes, and a dazed alien waking up after crash landing.
Zoom out.
Little Eddie sees something tiny wriggling around in his sandbox and decides to see what it tastes like."

If you have any modicum of imagination, part of what's interesting about that is how your brain has to do a few mental flips as the text rolls along and the mental context shifts. Not to mention that if asked to draw or animate the above, everyone would draw something different.

Now imagine if a computer tried to animate that text based on the text alone, and did it the same way for everyone who read it.

The elegance of the holodeck was that it tended to have actual objects pinned, but exactly how they looked and even to some degree how they interacted with the virtual environment was dependent on the experiences and imagination of the participants. This described tool provides none of that.

Now, if it combined sketch2photo with someone's own personal data set (facebook, etc) and used THAT to generate an animation, that would partially solve half the problem. But unless a lot of pre-parsing goes into it, to extract the original author's intent in context shifts and convert that to the animation somehow, there's still an unsolved half of a problem looming in the room.

Basically, the system would have to be an expert not only in the literature domain being read, but also in the experience domain of the reader. Possible, but not covered by this patent.

Err

[The Cat]

Isn't this copyright infringement? Creating a derivative work is an exclusive right belonging to a copyright owner.

Re:Err

[SeaFox]

Forget the "derivative work" business, you're taking a picture of the text with a cellphone. That's unauthorized reproduction, just as people are always getting warned about making photocopies of book sections.

Re:Headline

[The Cat]

Maybe modern audiences are fucking stupid?

Re:Anti-Intellectual bullshit

[The Cat]

Reddit is a motherfucking shitpond.

Re:Headline

[udippel]

Even here I cannot agree fully. Showing working code is one step, but one too few.
The European Patent Convention (I am too lazy to look up the American Act) clearly states that 'presentation of information' is not patentable. And I don't care if this is in the American act or not; I cannot consider presentation of information - with or without working code - as patentable. Sure, that is just my opinion (and maybe the europeans), but I will have to be pressed hard to change this point of view.
I do agree, that for eventually patentable stuff, a working example ought to be required. And not only for software. Think about a new mechanism for sending people to the moon, based on quantum physics. Then one could ask for a patent for sending someone up, and yet have no working prototype yet. Done, idea patented, and if it ever works in the lifetime of the patent, everyone actually doing it is screwed. And then they say, patents bolster inventiveness!

This is getting silly, silly, silly.

Re:Anti-Intellectual bullshit

[jetkust]

He said stupid people think Shakespeare is boring... It's pretty cut and dry. And I don't see how your analogy fits. They are not creating anything. And it doesn't even have anything to do with Shakespeare. They are given a more elaborate explanation of what they are reading in textbooks. People are hung up on the past believing everyone should learn things the way they learned things. As technology advances, so should the way we learn as well as what we learn.

Re:Prior art again Bill!

[LifesABeach]

I guess the Swedish Chef is in patent violation?

Re:Headline

[udippel]

You are correct, no doubt. That is what the patent system was meant for, initially, at its creation; and especially so the small inventor, who could otherwise never recover any costs if bigger industries 'stole' his / her idea.
Alas, those days are gone, long gone, Were you a regular Slashdot reader, you would have noticed by now, I'd guess.

Or, if I followed quite another string of arguments, I suggest you find out (Dr. Google is your friend) how much your patent creator would have to invest, to fork out, to lay on the table, from his own pocket, before the court procedures would be through [how many years] for him to be able to recover the costs of only the proceedings.
(I can give you a hint: utterly impossible for the small, eventually even the medium-size inventor - meaning the system is broken!)

Or, you could just watch a production of it...

[MattBD]

Surely the way to make Shakespeare less boring is to let schoolkids see a production of a Shakespeare play, rather than have them read the script? If it was written as a play, people should experience it primarily as one. Maybe after they've seen it, there's some value to going back and looking at the dialogue, but only afterwards. There have been some wonderful productions of Shakespeare plays - I really enjoyed the production of Hamlet with David Tennant and Patrick Stewart that was televised a few years ago.

Re:Headline

[udippel]

This is debatable. Though it lays open a major shortcoming in our days (as far as I can make out, at least): Everything seems to be run down to its business value; to its outer perspective. Be it a movie or a play. Almost all movies from the last 2 generations focus on realistic scenes, shootings, blood. Immersion. To me, movie is an art. Of images, camera shots and moves, dialogue, etc. that conveys moods, feelings, dreams, personal developments (very simplistic here).
Okay, back to Shakespeare. What I like with Shakespeare is exactly the language, that is hugely powerful, etc. No, I absolutely do not desire any Hamlet as a Danish prince, who finds out who murdered the king, and takes ages to decide if he should seriously go for a revenge; and when he does, in the end almost everyone is dead. That would be a very boring Hamlet. At least to me.

Bad Mod

[SteveFoerster]

Troll? Dafuq?

Re:Since when is Shakespeare boring?

[udippel]

It seems there is no Shake-App yet to un-bore our William?

Re:Headline

[DNS-and-BIND]

What do you mean, "when"? This is a reality in Detroit and has been for quite some time.

Re:Headline

[BrokenHalo]

To a modern audience Shakespeare is boing[sic] as hell.

I don't know how this pans out in the US, but here in Australia, good Shakespeare productions still fill theatres. That sort of implies that his work sort of has some relevance to modern audiences.

No-one reads Shakespeare for his plot-lines (many of his comedies in particular have a similar plot), but for the richness, power and depth of his expression, which goes beyond notions of what constitutes literacy - as is borne out by the fact that his original audiences were not universally literate.

I do sort of wonder what Shakespeare might have made of vampires and zombie apocalypses, though... ;-)

a GOOD POINT

[hurfy]

..."synthesized image sequence"...

So point it at manga....instant anime

Funimation and their ilk may not be to happy with Bill tho!

Will it add sound? I can't imagine kids being terribly entertained/engrossed with a silent anime version of Shakespeare clips and trying to add their own dialog !!!

He seems to be missing step 3. ??? just like we do also tho.

This makes

[Trikenstein]

me wish he'd go back to making commercials with Seinfeld

Re:Headline

[Forever Wondering]

Agreed. However, Wind River Systems used to do software consulting [VxWorks was a by product of that]. They were doing an automated storyboarding project for Francis Ford Coppola back in the 1980's.

Re:Headline

[__aaltlg1547]

No, it should be rejected because it HASN'T been done. It's not technology. It's an idea for a program. You should not be able to just describe a feature list and patent it. Imagine if this were done with drugs. I'm patenting a drug that will cure cancer. Here's how it works: You take a green pill twice a day for one week and at the end of six weeks you will be cancer-free. The drug works by programming your immune cells to attack cancer cells.

School's mission?

[manu0601]

I thought school's first mission was to teach children how to read, write and count. If I understand the idea correctly, this is a method to make them consume information without having to read. If that is the goal, then it belongs to leisure activity rather than school, IMO.

Is it April 1st Again Already?

[tofarr]

Or did they actually file a patent for something they have no idea how to build (probably while high as balls).

Maybe this was done ironically to show what's wrong with the patent system?

Fat chance...

The New Henry V

[Dabido]

My first thought was he was going to do this:

Think when we talk of horses, that you see them
Printing their proud hoofs i' the receiving earth;
And when we say car chase, that you see them too,
Drive fast and furiously down a runway for six minutes with explosions and a giant reptile smashing through the city ... er ...

But now I realise it was this:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more

Image of a fisting pops up on the screen.

Student: Daddy, I don't want to learn Shakespeare any more, it hurts my eyes and brain!

Patenting the Dumbing Down of America

[kattisch]

I love it. It's so much better to patent methods of dumbing down an already dumbed down America than to try challenging the dormant brain and patenting methods to challenge the dumbed down brain so it won't be quite so dumbed down.

Re:Prior art again Bill!

[vandamme]

There's an "e" on the end of Van Damme. Dank U.

How about

[WOOFYGOOFY]

How about making Shakespeare less boring and NOT seeking a patent. I mean, you have all the money already.

Bill Gates patent

[carys689]

Maybe Bill Gates should seek a patent on making Bill Gates less boring.

Re:Headline

[uninformedLuddite]

In this case it would allow the patent holder to claim someone else's work as their own when someone actually creates it in their garage.

That won't make Shakespeare any less boring

[MichaelSprague]

Shakespeare is inherently fascinating or boring, mostly depending on two factors. First, your level of understanding of the specific text in question, and secondly, your level of interest in the human condition. If you have a high level of interest on the second and a good understanding of any given Shakespearean work on the other, you are likely to find it fascinating, as Shakespeare dealt in timeless themes that play well in any gifted dramatist's hands.

What Mr. Gates seems to be proposing is certainly an interesting idea, judging it from nothing but this short blurb, but it sounds like an instant movie generation device, not a boredom eliminator. I have seen way too many boring movies and probably as many poorly written pieces of software to have any hope that an instantly generated movie will liven up the bard more than a stage or movie crew doing it up right can. Moreover, I have my doubts about auto-generated content drawn from anything coming out compelling anytime soon. Replacing Shakespeare is an especially daunting sounding challenge.

Really, this sounds like it hopes to do for the liberal arts what portable calculators did in the 1970's for math pograms: allow students to turn off their brains and get A's without ever understanding the material in any substantial way.

If that works, which, again, seems unlikely, the results seem unlikely to be really positive.

imo. humble or otherwise.

Re:Prior art again Bill!

[flyneye]

I just use two pieces of kite CF beneath the fretboard. Ebony is expensive.

Re:Prior art again Bill!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Hey! Another guitar/bass builder, on /. ! Who'da thunk it?

Especially on a bad, joke comment.

Huh?

[ncmathsadist]

Shakespeare? Boring?? What?

i like people who never grow old

[KingBenny]

they should rule the world but their egos wont let them leave their ceo state of mind i suppose
maybe its evolution and the ones needing less visual stimulation are the ones more capable of
processing
or maybe overpopulation has a tendency to produce more useless units from a biological point of view
or maybe if you get too many people, the soul of the universe needs to spread too much
or maybe
i just talk too much right, thats why i hardly reply to someone ever, the base losing means we are heading for a dark age that much should be clear, its the inquisition coming up all over again