Just remember, when the USPTO vacates this patent because it threatens them, be sure to complain to the USPTO that they're playing favorites. Either abuse of the patent system is a problem for everyone, or it's not, and the USPTO can't make an exception for themselves.
I've seen this debate over and over again, but one thing I see conspicuously missing from the argument on the side of the creationists is JUSTIFICATION for their conclusions. "I believe it should be so" is not a scientific or legal argument.
Right or wrong, the theory of evolution is science, because it's testable. Intelligent design could be taught in a religion or philosophy class, but it shouldn't be taught in science classes, because it isn't testable and therefore not science.
Is this a case of science creating its own circular argument? Science defines itself so that it can exclude anything scientists don't like. But just as many traditions have withstood the test of time, so has the scientific method. It's proven itself to be a valid and relatively objective tool for discovering the inner workings of the world around us.
The creationists tend to use status quo and popularity arguments to justify their beliefs and demands. It must be true, because so many people have believed it for so long. But they're not giving science the same treatment. The scientific method, in some form or other, has been around as a successful discovery tool for longer than Christianity has existed.
But it may be the best we SHOULD do under the circumstances. Sounds like a good idea to me to recombine known quantities, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Revolutions are good, when they work, but a gradual evolutionary path generally ensures that you have something working all the time. Small changes to an existing design are MUCH easier to test.
If there's one thing that evil has, it's principles. Microsoft is dedicated to its way of doing things, and they'll never be pushed by the good guys into changing their ideals.
The idea is that all patent applications go online, and users on the internet can post comments. Other users can moderate those comments, etc, and then a real patent examiner will looks to see if anyone's discovered any good prior art (or anything else that qualifies or disqualifies it) in the highest-rated comments.
I've had a bit a look over the application process for patent examiner. For one thing, they're a bit too strict on some of their requirements, but more importantly, you need H&R Block to help you fill out the paperwork.
I'm highly technically skilled. I have an extensive technical background, and I even have a bit of a clue about the law. But I wouldn't look forward to spending several days filling out forms. And being the government, they'd probably find a comma missing in some field somewhere (but not notice all the other missing commas everywhere else) and reject the forms on that basis, making you do them over, and BTW, they'd neglect to tell you which comma they found missing.
AND it'll be total hell for legitimate content too
on
The Future of the Net
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· Score: 1
Two teenagers who just happen to use the wrong combination of words will be very frustrated to find that they can't email or IM each other. Why? The 'immune system' identified their messages as SPAM and filtered them out. The teens keep trying, just to find that this 'robust' immune system decided that they were professional spammers and locked them out of using the 'net entirely.
This sort of things is GOING to happen. No system is perfect, so there will be plenty of false positives. What's worse, there will be no one to fix the problem. Customer service is something that will always suck, and the systems will become so complex that, while someone might be able to tell the immune system that it got a false positive, that'll only fix it for the one thing it was wrong about.
I've experienced this sort of thing already. I've written articles and done interviews for a popular tech web site. I have found, however, that I can seldom post to the forums. The wonderful Bayesian filter always filters my posts out as SPAM. Get this straight. It's MY article, and I can't comment on it or reply to other people's comments. It's not the fault of the site owner. It's the fault of 'intelligent' technology that is fundamentally broken.
Remember, all of these developments are commercially, not academically, driven. This means that whatever works 90% of the time will sell, and little effort will be put into improving things beyond that point. Commercial vendors don't want to fix things because there's no money in it, and open source developers don't want to fix thing, because they don't like being pushed around to do things on their own personal time (which is the only time they would spend working on it).
In the end, cybercrime should be just like any other crime. You have to let people have the freedom to commit the crime in the first place, but when they do, you throw the book at them.
There's one weird thing about LCD's that I've noticed, that lots of other people notice, but for which I have never gotten a meaningful explanation. In fast-moving images, I see blockiness (squares) that looks JUST like MPEG compression artifacts, but people swear that they're not compression artifacts and rather something peculiar about LCDs that you don't see on other TVs.
The last time I saw this technology was at the 2004 SID (Society for Information Display) show, in Seattle. LG/Phillips had one in their booth. I believe they were using LEDs for the backlights and were cycling rows of them in time with the LCD update. Being 60 Hz, the flickering was noticable, but the ghosting was completely absent.
Here's the problem: With a TV or movie screen, the image is flashed very briefly (on a TV, different parts of the screen are flashed at different times, but that's not important), and your brain stitches the scene together. The hold time on the image is VERY brief, so while it looks like a steady picture, it's really a succession of flashes with relatively long periods of darkness in between then.
With an LCD, on the other hand, you could say that the hold time is as long as the frame period (16 milliseconds or whatever). The LCD has no periods of darkness. With the CRT and movie screen, your brain is what stitches the images together, inferring the motion. With the LCD, you actually see the image change, and your brain perceives that as a smear. IIRC, what's happening is that persistence of vision is working against you and you end up seeing two frames at once.
Besides, raster-scanning the backlight, there are two other things that can reduce the smearing effect. One is to increase the frame rate. The higher the frame rate, the smaller the motion steps. It essentially reduces the hold time on each frame.
At the show, I went to a seminar by a guy named Kompenhouwer. For any device, you can mathematically model how it converts its input to output. This is referred to as a "transfer function". This guy developed transfer functions for the LCD and for a CRT and inserted a filter (It was really precomputed in software, but you could do it in real-time) between the video signal and the LCD that applied the CRT transfer function and inverse LCD transfer function. Those together cancel out the smearing effects of the LCD and make it look more like a CRT. For static images, the filter does nothing, but as I recall, the effect of the filter on motion is to amplify the high-frequency components of the image in the direction of motion. I think that as long as you are tracking the motion of the moving image with your eye, it looks right, but if you don't, it looks weird (but I may be remembering that last bit incorrectly).
Was anyone surprised that Microsoft copied Google, AGAIN? This is just another example of MS slapping together a poor imitation of someone else's innovation.
Well, it doesn't work at all with Konqueror (neither does google), but while google maps works perfectly with Mozilla, the results are varied for MSN. Naturally.
Don't get me wrong. I was careful to explain that much of the advanced stuff was added by other people. I guess he just figured that those other people also did some copying.
I talked at length with that guy from the Toqueville institute. I tried and tried to explain that Linux is just a kernel, only a small part of an OS, and that anyone with a decent CS education is taught everything they need to know to develop a kernel as simple as the first Linux kernel that Linus wrote. I explained that Linux is a social phenomenon more than a technical achievement, because, conceptually, kernels just aren't such a big deal (although debugging them is a hassle, well handled by the 'many eyes' of the community).
No matter what I said, he was not able to grasp it. He just could not believe that one guy could write an OS kernel. But he really didn't understand what a kernel is either, so that was a bit of a barrier also. The fact that various CS professors had come out and said the same thing didn't faze him.
Darl McBride is just another non-technical businessman who thinks that operating systems are black magic that only huge teams of people can write. His reasoning leads him to believe that if "one guy" did it, but one guy really couldn't have done it, then he must have copied it. Pure, simple, logical, but unsound in that it completely doesn't account for just how simple or complex a kernel is.
Just like how some people can't possibly understand how a piston engine works, some people aren't cut out to grok OS kernels. Darl just doesn't have the brains for it. (Plus, his primary motivation is to make money, not actually UNDERSTAND anything.)
Pretty much, the UN exists only to suck money and power away from the United States (and a few other countries with stable economies). Lots of little, greedy countries with their hands out for stuff, and the US is the one who foots the bill.
I'm all for globalization. I'm not bigoted against other countries or peoples, but I am "bigoted" against many of their governments. I'm tired of all these "poor" countries who aren't smart enough to run their own economies coming to the US for hand-outs. Really. And just as often, they take action to try to take some sort of resource, power, or right away from the US so that we're beholden to them and have to give them MORE money.
This attempt by the UN to take control of domain names is NOT an attempt to globalize it. If it were, I'd be in favor of it, but by definition, actions taken by the UN are designed to take money from the US. This is just another example of foreign governments trying to take something away from the US so that we have to give them lots of money. Just you wait. The instant the UN gets their grubby hands on it, the price for owning a domain name is going to sky-rocket, and not only that, but the effort involved in actually obtaining ones will become so Bysantine that the cost of doing business on the Internet will become prohibitive to many small businesses. And guess which country has the most businesses on the Web! Of course, they'll justify the extra cost by marking the money that goes into that as "aid", which is just another word for "taking money from the US and giving it to stupid governments who can't manage a stable economy."
Yes, that's right, piracy. Mind you, people steal GPL code all the time, but the GPL is a primary motivator for people who want to be able to share software but protect it from blood suckers who want to profit from their hard work without giving anything back.
Yes, there are times when you WANT to make things easy for companies to adopt, like when you're trying to push a new standard. MIT and BSD licenses exist for such purposes.
But in the war against monopolies and over-priced, lousy commercial software, the GPL is our only competitive advantage. I'm not saying there isn't a place for proprietary software. I believe in freedom and choice, and if someone chooses to produce proprietary software, that's up to them. The market will bear out whether their offering is better or worse than the alternatives and if it's worth the money. But we'd be idiots to give them an unfair advantage by allowing them to embrace and extend OUR software just because we choose to share the source code.
It's amazing what technology has and has not advanced since the late 60's. Computers are orders of magnitude faster, but we don't have flying cars.
What it comes down to is that propultion technology has not really advanced that far. Sure, it's more efficient and fine-tuned, but it's not revolutionarily different. I mean, if all you have is chemicals, all you can do is tinker with what chemicals you use. The only revolutionary change will occur when we develop propultion technology that doesn't use chemicals.
It has been requested that that wiki (not written by the hardware designers) be updated to clarify this situation.
Timothy Miller and some other hardware engineers are forming a company to produce this hardware. They have a work plan that is being followed (http://opengraphics.gitk.com/ogplan.jpg), and they are on schedule.
It can be said that the OGP is a public foundation, and the original founder is involved with a real venture to produce the hardware. The distinction is that the hardware designers are influenced but not totally controlled by the public foundation, because the hardware designers have to consider things like die area and power consumption, which may impact the features that the users ask for.
As for open source hardware, there is a plan in place to release the RTL (Verilog code) under a Free license. A compromise was reached where some of the RTL is released immediately under LGPL (you can find that on the mailing list), and the rest of it is released at a date that does not impair their ability to acquire investors and recoup initial investment. (You should read the full discussion before arguing with that, because all of the issues have been hashed out carefully.)
The OGP founters do not believe in lobbying anyone. If a company doesn't want to release specs, that's their choice. The founders' response to that is that THEY are releasing specs.
"As long as customers are willing to pay for them." That's the problem. Microsoft already has your money for Win2K. You've paid them. It's over. They get no more money from you. What they want now is either for you to go away and leave them alone or, preferably, to buy the latest release. To the greedy, supporting the old version that they're not getting any more money from is a sink hole.
If Microsoft didn't release upgrades ("innovate"), people would complain that Microsoft stagnates. (Hey, they already do that!) It's funny that many of those same complainers also have yet to upgrade to the latest version.
So, basically, Microsoft can't win here. No matter what they do, people will complain. Forced upgrade or forced stagnation.
Good thing I use Linux and my upgrades are free.:)
The Open Graphics Project isn't lobbying anything. It's a group of engineers who are designing graphics hardware. I guess you didn't bother to read about the OGP before commenting. Typical slashdot.
Well, it occurs to me that there may be more dust on the floor or whatever surface it's on, meaning that if the airflow is up, it'll suck more dust into the case. But perhaps I'm wrong, because the dust has to fall from somewhere.
Slashdot Mirror
Just remember, when the USPTO vacates this patent because it threatens them, be sure to complain to the USPTO that they're playing favorites. Either abuse of the patent system is a problem for everyone, or it's not, and the USPTO can't make an exception for themselves.
I've seen this debate over and over again, but one thing I see conspicuously missing from the argument on the side of the creationists is JUSTIFICATION for their conclusions. "I believe it should be so" is not a scientific or legal argument.
Right or wrong, the theory of evolution is science, because it's testable. Intelligent design could be taught in a religion or philosophy class, but it shouldn't be taught in science classes, because it isn't testable and therefore not science.
Is this a case of science creating its own circular argument? Science defines itself so that it can exclude anything scientists don't like. But just as many traditions have withstood the test of time, so has the scientific method. It's proven itself to be a valid and relatively objective tool for discovering the inner workings of the world around us.
The creationists tend to use status quo and popularity arguments to justify their beliefs and demands. It must be true, because so many people have believed it for so long. But they're not giving science the same treatment. The scientific method, in some form or other, has been around as a successful discovery tool for longer than Christianity has existed.
But it may be the best we SHOULD do under the circumstances. Sounds like a good idea to me to recombine known quantities, rather than trying to reinvent the wheel. Revolutions are good, when they work, but a gradual evolutionary path generally ensures that you have something working all the time. Small changes to an existing design are MUCH easier to test.
If there's one thing that evil has, it's principles. Microsoft is dedicated to its way of doing things, and they'll never be pushed by the good guys into changing their ideals.
The idea is that all patent applications go online, and users on the internet can post comments. Other users can moderate those comments, etc, and then a real patent examiner will looks to see if anyone's discovered any good prior art (or anything else that qualifies or disqualifies it) in the highest-rated comments.
I've had a bit a look over the application process for patent examiner. For one thing, they're a bit too strict on some of their requirements, but more importantly, you need H&R Block to help you fill out the paperwork.
I'm highly technically skilled. I have an extensive technical background, and I even have a bit of a clue about the law. But I wouldn't look forward to spending several days filling out forms. And being the government, they'd probably find a comma missing in some field somewhere (but not notice all the other missing commas everywhere else) and reject the forms on that basis, making you do them over, and BTW, they'd neglect to tell you which comma they found missing.
Two teenagers who just happen to use the wrong combination of words will be very frustrated to find that they can't email or IM each other. Why? The 'immune system' identified their messages as SPAM and filtered them out. The teens keep trying, just to find that this 'robust' immune system decided that they were professional spammers and locked them out of using the 'net entirely.
This sort of things is GOING to happen. No system is perfect, so there will be plenty of false positives. What's worse, there will be no one to fix the problem. Customer service is something that will always suck, and the systems will become so complex that, while someone might be able to tell the immune system that it got a false positive, that'll only fix it for the one thing it was wrong about.
I've experienced this sort of thing already. I've written articles and done interviews for a popular tech web site. I have found, however, that I can seldom post to the forums. The wonderful Bayesian filter always filters my posts out as SPAM. Get this straight. It's MY article, and I can't comment on it or reply to other people's comments. It's not the fault of the site owner. It's the fault of 'intelligent' technology that is fundamentally broken.
Remember, all of these developments are commercially, not academically, driven. This means that whatever works 90% of the time will sell, and little effort will be put into improving things beyond that point. Commercial vendors don't want to fix things because there's no money in it, and open source developers don't want to fix thing, because they don't like being pushed around to do things on their own personal time (which is the only time they would spend working on it).
In the end, cybercrime should be just like any other crime. You have to let people have the freedom to commit the crime in the first place, but when they do, you throw the book at them.
The odd thing is that I looked hard at the same video on things like plasma and DLT, and I didn't see the artifacts.
There's one weird thing about LCD's that I've noticed, that lots of other people notice, but for which I have never gotten a meaningful explanation. In fast-moving images, I see blockiness (squares) that looks JUST like MPEG compression artifacts, but people swear that they're not compression artifacts and rather something peculiar about LCDs that you don't see on other TVs.
The last time I saw this technology was at the 2004 SID (Society for Information Display) show, in Seattle. LG/Phillips had one in their booth. I believe they were using LEDs for the backlights and were cycling rows of them in time with the LCD update. Being 60 Hz, the flickering was noticable, but the ghosting was completely absent.
Here's the problem: With a TV or movie screen, the image is flashed very briefly (on a TV, different parts of the screen are flashed at different times, but that's not important), and your brain stitches the scene together. The hold time on the image is VERY brief, so while it looks like a steady picture, it's really a succession of flashes with relatively long periods of darkness in between then.
With an LCD, on the other hand, you could say that the hold time is as long as the frame period (16 milliseconds or whatever). The LCD has no periods of darkness. With the CRT and movie screen, your brain is what stitches the images together, inferring the motion. With the LCD, you actually see the image change, and your brain perceives that as a smear. IIRC, what's happening is that persistence of vision is working against you and you end up seeing two frames at once.
Besides, raster-scanning the backlight, there are two other things that can reduce the smearing effect. One is to increase the frame rate. The higher the frame rate, the smaller the motion steps. It essentially reduces the hold time on each frame.
At the show, I went to a seminar by a guy named Kompenhouwer. For any device, you can mathematically model how it converts its input to output. This is referred to as a "transfer function". This guy developed transfer functions for the LCD and for a CRT and inserted a filter (It was really precomputed in software, but you could do it in real-time) between the video signal and the LCD that applied the CRT transfer function and inverse LCD transfer function. Those together cancel out the smearing effects of the LCD and make it look more like a CRT. For static images, the filter does nothing, but as I recall, the effect of the filter on motion is to amplify the high-frequency components of the image in the direction of motion. I think that as long as you are tracking the motion of the moving image with your eye, it looks right, but if you don't, it looks weird (but I may be remembering that last bit incorrectly).
Was anyone surprised that Microsoft copied Google, AGAIN? This is just another example of MS slapping together a poor imitation of someone else's innovation.
Well, it doesn't work at all with Konqueror (neither does google), but while google maps works perfectly with Mozilla, the results are varied for MSN. Naturally.
Don't get me wrong. I was careful to explain that much of the advanced stuff was added by other people. I guess he just figured that those other people also did some copying.
I talked at length with that guy from the Toqueville institute. I tried and tried to explain that Linux is just a kernel, only a small part of an OS, and that anyone with a decent CS education is taught everything they need to know to develop a kernel as simple as the first Linux kernel that Linus wrote. I explained that Linux is a social phenomenon more than a technical achievement, because, conceptually, kernels just aren't such a big deal (although debugging them is a hassle, well handled by the 'many eyes' of the community).
No matter what I said, he was not able to grasp it. He just could not believe that one guy could write an OS kernel. But he really didn't understand what a kernel is either, so that was a bit of a barrier also. The fact that various CS professors had come out and said the same thing didn't faze him.
Darl McBride is just another non-technical businessman who thinks that operating systems are black magic that only huge teams of people can write. His reasoning leads him to believe that if "one guy" did it, but one guy really couldn't have done it, then he must have copied it. Pure, simple, logical, but unsound in that it completely doesn't account for just how simple or complex a kernel is.
Just like how some people can't possibly understand how a piston engine works, some people aren't cut out to grok OS kernels. Darl just doesn't have the brains for it. (Plus, his primary motivation is to make money, not actually UNDERSTAND anything.)
Only on Slashdot will you find people who will defend any government, as long as it's not the US government.
The fact of the matter is, I'm just as glad the US Congress has stayed away as I am that the UN hasn't gotten hold of it either.
Governments are greedy. Period. I don't care who or where they are. This has nothing to do with staying in one's place.
Pretty much, the UN exists only to suck money and power away from the United States (and a few other countries with stable economies). Lots of little, greedy countries with their hands out for stuff, and the US is the one who foots the bill.
I'm all for globalization. I'm not bigoted against other countries or peoples, but I am "bigoted" against many of their governments. I'm tired of all these "poor" countries who aren't smart enough to run their own economies coming to the US for hand-outs. Really. And just as often, they take action to try to take some sort of resource, power, or right away from the US so that we're beholden to them and have to give them MORE money.
This attempt by the UN to take control of domain names is NOT an attempt to globalize it. If it were, I'd be in favor of it, but by definition, actions taken by the UN are designed to take money from the US. This is just another example of foreign governments trying to take something away from the US so that we have to give them lots of money. Just you wait. The instant the UN gets their grubby hands on it, the price for owning a domain name is going to sky-rocket, and not only that, but the effort involved in actually obtaining ones will become so Bysantine that the cost of doing business on the Internet will become prohibitive to many small businesses. And guess which country has the most businesses on the Web! Of course, they'll justify the extra cost by marking the money that goes into that as "aid", which is just another word for "taking money from the US and giving it to stupid governments who can't manage a stable economy."
Yes, that's right, piracy. Mind you, people steal GPL code all the time, but the GPL is a primary motivator for people who want to be able to share software but protect it from blood suckers who want to profit from their hard work without giving anything back.
Yes, there are times when you WANT to make things easy for companies to adopt, like when you're trying to push a new standard. MIT and BSD licenses exist for such purposes.
But in the war against monopolies and over-priced, lousy commercial software, the GPL is our only competitive advantage. I'm not saying there isn't a place for proprietary software. I believe in freedom and choice, and if someone chooses to produce proprietary software, that's up to them. The market will bear out whether their offering is better or worse than the alternatives and if it's worth the money. But we'd be idiots to give them an unfair advantage by allowing them to embrace and extend OUR software just because we choose to share the source code.
It's amazing what technology has and has not advanced since the late 60's. Computers are orders of magnitude faster, but we don't have flying cars.
What it comes down to is that propultion technology has not really advanced that far. Sure, it's more efficient and fine-tuned, but it's not revolutionarily different. I mean, if all you have is chemicals, all you can do is tinker with what chemicals you use. The only revolutionary change will occur when we develop propultion technology that doesn't use chemicals.
It has been requested that that wiki (not written by the hardware designers) be updated to clarify this situation.
Timothy Miller and some other hardware engineers are forming a company to produce this hardware. They have a work plan that is being followed (http://opengraphics.gitk.com/ogplan.jpg), and they are on schedule.
It can be said that the OGP is a public foundation, and the original founder is involved with a real venture to produce the hardware. The distinction is that the hardware designers are influenced but not totally controlled by the public foundation, because the hardware designers have to consider things like die area and power consumption, which may impact the features that the users ask for.
As for open source hardware, there is a plan in place to release the RTL (Verilog code) under a Free license. A compromise was reached where some of the RTL is released immediately under LGPL (you can find that on the mailing list), and the rest of it is released at a date that does not impair their ability to acquire investors and recoup initial investment. (You should read the full discussion before arguing with that, because all of the issues have been hashed out carefully.)
The OGP founters do not believe in lobbying anyone. If a company doesn't want to release specs, that's their choice. The founders' response to that is that THEY are releasing specs.
"As long as customers are willing to pay for them." That's the problem. Microsoft already has your money for Win2K. You've paid them. It's over. They get no more money from you. What they want now is either for you to go away and leave them alone or, preferably, to buy the latest release. To the greedy, supporting the old version that they're not getting any more money from is a sink hole.
If Microsoft didn't release upgrades ("innovate"), people would complain that Microsoft stagnates. (Hey, they already do that!) It's funny that many of those same complainers also have yet to upgrade to the latest version.
:)
So, basically, Microsoft can't win here. No matter what they do, people will complain. Forced upgrade or forced stagnation.
Good thing I use Linux and my upgrades are free.
The Open Graphics Project isn't lobbying anything. It's a group of engineers who are designing graphics hardware. I guess you didn't bother to read about the OGP before commenting. Typical slashdot.
Huh. Slashdot screwed that up. Let's try again: The Open Graphics Project.
The Open Graphics Project
Well, it occurs to me that there may be more dust on the floor or whatever surface it's on, meaning that if the airflow is up, it'll suck more dust into the case. But perhaps I'm wrong, because the dust has to fall from somewhere.