I can't help thinking this sounds like saying, "so-and-so really has an edge with this mouse thingy," in the early 80s. Every product will absorb this, and people will just come to expect that all the stuff they buy has some kind of touch interface. None of us will care which company shipped their touchable tchotchke nine months ahead of everyone else.
Apple got protection for the touch wheel on the iPod, but if they don't get protection for gestures, this will probably not be enough to differentiate their product. They'll have to go back to pushing thinness as the measure of all things.
IBM is just patenting everything they can think of so that no other similarly-extremely-huge-and-well-funded-entity can sue us little people for using an obvious invention (or process, or collection of symbols, or Turing tape) to promote useful arts and sciences.
A brilliant strategy for repairing the USPTO. Now we won't have to hire people who can actually reasonably award patents. Hey, IBM should patent that!
Any numbers backing that up? $20k seems more than reasonable for licensing a single image, but I could be wrong. Should the court award the victim more money than a piece of stolen property is worth? Probably not.
...where the mentioned gestures were not yet put to use. But sometimes I feel like I'm living in an imaginary universe, considering the patents being awarded.
That doesn't stop it from happening.
True. (and I don't mean to imply you don't also think this is ridiculous, however...) abusing the patent system requires that you are actually granted the abusive patent, and therefore the patent office is complicit in every abuse of the patent system. The whole point is that these people are not supposed to grant patents that do not "promote the progress of science and useful arts."
How backwards would software be had something like the drag-and-drop gesture been patented? You could pretty much kiss Adobe goodbye and the entire DTP revolution along with it in that world.
Isn't the complaint here that Apple is patenting only the gestures?
With this logic, couldn't you also patent something like "to move cursor to the right side of the screen, use hand to move mouse to the right of the mousepad?" In this situation the competitors are free to implement "to move cursor to the right side of the screen, use hand to move mouse to the left of the mousepad." Actually, only the first person to patent that gesture gets to use it.
What they are in fact doing is patenting a new method to interact with the computer.
No, they are not. They are patenting gestures. Don't make this more magical than is necessary.
What bothers me is that they prattle on and on about this kind of interaction being "intuitive." If the gestures are "intuitive," doesn't that by definition mean that they are already "inside" every person? That is, the gesture-as-representation-of-information, if it is "natural," is something discovered, and not invented. If this is not the case, then it's not "intuitive." So which is it?
If I develop an interface that interprets "waving goodbye" as "turn off computer," can I patent "waving goodbye?" Can I make it illegal for everyone else to use this very "intuitive" gesture?
Are you honestly bitching about having to lug a small usb hub?
I guarantee that packing and using a usb hub of any size is more inconvenient than the what, 0.16" difference in thickness that Apple fans will not let up on as being the most indispensable feature of the AirBook.
Then you can enable case insensitive matching in bash etc by editing your ~/.inputrc.
Without being able to at least infer what this means:
My Linux installation is case-insensitive, if you use JFS you can enable "OS/2 compatibility" with the -O option to jfs_mkfs, which will make it case insensitive.
JFS is obviously some sort of file system. Case sensitivity is probably a quality of filenames. An option exists to toggle this.
I agree Prince isn't the most torrent'ed artist. However, I am "computer savvy" enough to torrent, and yet I listen to Prince. Other "computer savvy" people listen to Prince. Plenty of people who aren't "computer savvy" listen to your favorite band.
If a Prince torrent is out there, expect him to sue whether or not he's a top download. Attention grab? Maybe, but a bigger attention grab is playing the Super Bowl. It's possible he's suing because he wants money for it's own sake. Just sayin.
Humans are naturally suspicious of that which comes too easily.
If that's really the problem, people would be blowing away Windows every time they bought a new machine. What choice is "easier" than a pre-installed OS?
If you were running around forcing free samples into people's hands, they would be very wary.
Then people should be wary of Windows: the perception is that it's "free," and the reality is that it's forced.
But that's not the case. Why? Because there is no choice of OS at the time of purchase. Until a majority of retailers offer Linux as an option and subtract the cost of Windows from the computer, typical users will not run Linux.
we may have sufficiently powerful hardware that the software can be "dumb", that is, just simulating the entire physical brain.
Unless there is non-Turing computation in that software, you'd have to accept that the same program being carried out with a pencil and a piece of paper would also be "intelligent."
You'd need an extremely large piece of paper, of course.
Selling out over 140,000 tickets in 20 minutes? Playing 21 consecutive concerts in London? People pay attention to Prince.
You need to offer labor that is in higher demand.
on
Has Ron Paul Quit?
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I do similar work to my dad. At my age my dad was able to support a family of several kids and buy a reasonable sized house. I live on my own and can only afford a much smaller place.
Have you considered finding more profitable work? In all seriousness, there is no reason to expect that work which paid well in the past should pay well now.
Learn your history from someone who was there, because you're the one who looks like the "clueless dweeb."
"I'm a primary witness - I was part of that scene." says Whitfield Diffie, adding:
"And, I always thought that the use of hacking to describe malicious computer activity, was in some sense, legitimate, since the word 'hacking' at MIT also described doing less savory things, often, to people. I never found the dual-use terrible distressing." Diffie offers the following history:
"When I arrived at MIT in 1961, the term 'hacking' meant two things: one, was not to be working [...] the other thing was to play a trick of some kind, it need not be on somebody. [...] these two terms exist for 'hack.' One of which means to be doing, you know, you find something to do other than study Physics because, you know, too hard to study for the exam. One of the big things that appeared, of course, in the 1950s, there began to be computers around. And, some people fell in love with them. [...] The sense in which programming was hacking, it was not that the word 'hacking' is in any way restricted to programming, it was that many people did their hacking, that is, their not working on what the syllabus said they were going to be examined on, in the form of, particularly, going to the TX-0 and the PDP-1 [...] or going to work on the [NX] at the Model Railroad Club [...] hacking [programming] fell very naturally within the existing use of the MIT term, 'hacking.'" Listen from 1:00:00 to 1:03:30 of this interview:
http://chaosradio.ccc.de/cri008.html
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Nearly every man can look good in a suit if they're willing to spend the money on tailoring. You're a lucky man if you can wear suits "off the rack."
What I like less is when the government tells someone how they can't use their property.
sorry
I can't help thinking this sounds like saying, "so-and-so really has an edge with this mouse thingy," in the early 80s. Every product will absorb this, and people will just come to expect that all the stuff they buy has some kind of touch interface. None of us will care which company shipped their touchable tchotchke nine months ahead of everyone else.
Apple got protection for the touch wheel on the iPod, but if they don't get protection for gestures, this will probably not be enough to differentiate their product. They'll have to go back to pushing thinness as the measure of all things.
IBM is just patenting everything they can think of so that no other similarly-extremely-huge-and-well-funded-entity can sue us little people for using an obvious invention (or process, or collection of symbols, or Turing tape) to promote useful arts and sciences.
A brilliant strategy for repairing the USPTO. Now we won't have to hire people who can actually reasonably award patents. Hey, IBM should patent that!
</sarcasm>
True. (and I don't mean to imply you don't also think this is ridiculous, however...) abusing the patent system requires that you are actually granted the abusive patent, and therefore the patent office is complicit in every abuse of the patent system. The whole point is that these people are not supposed to grant patents that do not "promote the progress of science and useful arts."
How backwards would software be had something like the drag-and-drop gesture been patented? You could pretty much kiss Adobe goodbye and the entire DTP revolution along with it in that world.
Isn't the complaint here that Apple is patenting only the gestures?
With this logic, couldn't you also patent something like "to move cursor to the right side of the screen, use hand to move mouse to the right of the mousepad?" In this situation the competitors are free to implement "to move cursor to the right side of the screen, use hand to move mouse to the left of the mousepad." Actually, only the first person to patent that gesture gets to use it.
This is abuse of the patent system.
No, they are not. They are patenting gestures. Don't make this more magical than is necessary.
What bothers me is that they prattle on and on about this kind of interaction being "intuitive." If the gestures are "intuitive," doesn't that by definition mean that they are already "inside" every person? That is, the gesture-as-representation-of-information, if it is "natural," is something discovered, and not invented. If this is not the case, then it's not "intuitive." So which is it?
If I develop an interface that interprets "waving goodbye" as "turn off computer," can I patent "waving goodbye?" Can I make it illegal for everyone else to use this very "intuitive" gesture?
I guarantee that packing and using a usb hub of any size is more inconvenient than the what, 0.16" difference in thickness that Apple fans will not let up on as being the most indispensable feature of the AirBook.
Puh-leeze.
I've never downloaded a Prince album. I'm a Prince fan. Is this confusing?
I agree Prince isn't the most torrent'ed artist. However, I am "computer savvy" enough to torrent, and yet I listen to Prince. Other "computer savvy" people listen to Prince. Plenty of people who aren't "computer savvy" listen to your favorite band.
If a Prince torrent is out there, expect him to sue whether or not he's a top download. Attention grab? Maybe, but a bigger attention grab is playing the Super Bowl. It's possible he's suing because he wants money for it's own sake. Just sayin.
If that's really the problem, people would be blowing away Windows every time they bought a new machine. What choice is "easier" than a pre-installed OS?
Then people should be wary of Windows: the perception is that it's "free," and the reality is that it's forced.
But that's not the case. Why? Because there is no choice of OS at the time of purchase. Until a majority of retailers offer Linux as an option and subtract the cost of Windows from the computer, typical users will not run Linux.
The situation is out of our hands.
And yet, it's the least-ridiculous of all his routines. Unless assless pants quit being ridiculous.
Selling out over 140,000 tickets in 20 minutes? Playing 21 consecutive concerts in London? People pay attention to Prince.