I feel like this is almost a counterargument, actually. If you can re-arrange the letters in a word other than the first and last, and still read it fine (as has been demonstrated), then doesn't that imply the shape ISN'T the key factor? The shape would be changing, but its still just as recognizable. So its something more than just the shape, no?
Your one word offers very little insight. Yes, PETA is protected under fair use, specifically parody. Good job.
Now, why aren't fan works covered by parody? Why is parody protected so much more than other types of fair use? etc., etc., etc.....
The one-word response is an obvious half-ass. Either try to contribute, or just save yourself the time and don't bother.
Fair enough.
What do you think? Your suggestion that Samsung or Google not going after this patent is a fair argument that it may not be feasible to limit / overturn.
But regardless of the current law, do you feel that a patent on "handles to re-size text" should be a patent-able innovation? Like I said, allowing this sort of patents is going to have a massively detrimental effect on innovation and software development. If something as trivially simple as re-sizing text can be patented, then how is one to be expected to know what is allowed? And doesn't that present a sort of inherent monopoly? Now, only Microsoft can resize text with handles, and everybody else's software either has to be missing features people have come to expect, or has to licence to Microsoft.
Imagine if we allowed JK Rowling to patent Boy Wizard Story instead of merely trademarking the name "Harry Potter". Thats it, no more boy wizards, nope. She did it first. Who cares if its a pretty obvious idea, she did it FIRST, so now you have to pay her whatever she thinks is fair.
It seems to me we massively overrate the idea in this country. Implementation is arguably more important. The mere fact that it can be represented in software proves that the idea can be broken down into a series of extremely trivial mathematical steps. We do not allow patents on mathematical formula for a very good reason; if we did, it would completely hamstring math advancement. Furthermore, one can see that mathematical formula are not so much creative art as they are intrinsic to reality, part of our universe already and merely waiting observation and description.
So when a bunch of Nintendo fanboys make their own non-commercial game for fun, they get sent all kinds of angry lawyer letters and told to stop.
So what makes PETA immune? I'm being honest here, I would like to know how the law works out this way. It seems to me if fair use doesn't cover non-commercial use by fans, then big organizations like PETA surely shouldn't be covered; and if PETA is covered, then surely the small grassroots fan projects are too?
I was going to agree with you, but typing up my feelings just got very frustrating. I'll leave it at "I don't want to live on this planet anymore."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35TbGjt-weA
I'm going to preface this with IANAL, certainly not a patent lawyer. I'm just a software developer, trying to interpret the law in the best way my layman understanding can, and also expressing what I feel is morally / ethically right regardless of the current law.
The way I read this patent application, they are describing a method for using handles to re-size a text selection.
They are not claiming to have invented handles.
They are not claiming to have invented selecting text. They give prior art examples of their own work at improving selecting text and others' attempts.
They take credit for a rotation handle, but admit they did not invent rotation, nor handles.
"FIG. 3 depicts a selection area (or selection tool) according to one embodiment of the present invention. The tool may include body 301 and one or more selection handles 302a, b. The body 301 of the selection area may be of any shape, and in the depicted example, is rectangular to account for selected electronic data, such as text, in a document. The body 301 may have an appearance that is distinguishable from non-selected portions and/or items on the electronic document to distinguish selected portions from non-selected portions. Accordingly, the selection body 301 may be an inverse color of the selected text... The selection handles 302 generally allow the user to resize and/or adjust the selection of a portion of data, while maintaining the selection. In some embodiments, the selection handles 302 may be graphical symbols that may be moved to resize a selection body 301. For selecting text, the dragging of a selection handle 302 may increase or decrease portions of the current selection body 301, depending on the particular handle being moved, the direction in which the handle 302 is moved, and the directional flow of the language of the underlying text."
To recap: They came up with the idea for using handles to change a selection area.
Does that give them a patent over using handles to resize a window? I guess not, since it specifies text. Does somebody have a patent on that? Seems to me it shouldn't be patentable, but if it is, then that seems like it would overshadow this patent. You stole our resizing areas for your resizing texts!
Here's the thing: this shouldn't be patent-able. I'm willing to suggest that such an "invention" was inevitable. Given computers increasing use, given large use of text editors, given resizing is A THING, and that people DO IT, and that using handles to resize something is already accepted common practice on computers...
Then using handles to resize text is not an INNOVATION. It is a trivial combination of existing ideas, and such should not be patent-able. This creates a first-come first-served situation where everybody races to get trivial patents and then everybody is prevented from writing any software at all, because other people have patents on things fundamental to development, while you hold patents on things equally fundamental that they would need. Its patent gridlock. This is the exact opposite of "protecting innovation", which is what the patent office claims to facilitate.
Also, I guess this is just how patent law works, but was it really necessary for them to break down how computers wor
We want to do that. We want to picket wallstreet, stand in front of major businesses, that would be great.But they won't let us. They tell us the park is the designated zone. Then we move to the park. Then they tell us the park is closed. So now where is the "first amendment zone" ? *sigh*
Yes, because public schools are models of efficiency. >_'
Maybe your local property tax isn't too bad, but there's federal grant money going to the schools as well, which comes from your income tax.
When was the last time you dealt with government "service" ?
I know AT&T customer support is crap, but people vote with their dollars. Apparently what we want in the modern wal-mart world is the cheapest products possible; services be damned. If you don't like that, go shop somewhere else that prioritizes differently. Me, I'm poor, so I'm okay with losing on service to save money. At least we get choice.
With government, it would be shitty service AND costly.
In the past, we didn't have X. So why do we need X?
You're right, America is absolutely flawless. Why would we try to improve the quality of our lives?
Just as to claim that the person has everything to do with it is absurd.
Can you please be a little more mature? We're not going to get anywhere with these "nuh-uh" style of responses. Waste of time.
Surprise, real life is complicated and nuanced!
Thats a pretty cool idea, but from looking over their site, It seems a little flawed. This only works so long as everybody else is ignorant to the existence of spamgourmet. If somebody was to realize what was up, they could take your frombigcorp.3.spacecowboy@spamgourmet and instead just send it to frombigcorp.20.spacecowboy@spamgourmet, you don't really have much control over that part. It only works if the person treats the email as a normal verbatim email. I can pretty easily write a script that takes anything that matches *@spamgourmet.com and then mangles the front part of it. As long as you keep changing the front part, you could keep spamming the person.
In order for this to be truly robust and defend against spam, they'd have to ONLY allow emails through to disposable addresses that are pre-defined. You login, choose a new keyword, and then tell it how many emails to let through on that keyword. Only the keywords you would set up would work, so it would take an in-feasible amount of brute forcing to get a spam email through without knowing a keyword.
The current implementation is more convenient, but easily exploitable.
This is my first time looking at spamgourmet, if I'm missing something I'd appreciate somebody letting me know.
Is it shocking that highschool or middleschool kids would do physical harm to themselves to try to keep up academically? YES.
I didn't mean to insinuate that performance enhancing drugs for football was okay. Merely that most kids are more interested in football, band, videogames, etc. than doing academics. My point was, if they're taking performance enhancing drugs for something most kids don't even care about, then things have gotten rather dangerous. At least with football, you could just say the kid himself wanted to win too bad. With academics, it seems more like his parents or his teacher are pushing him too hard. You could also find the coach was pushing the football kid too hard, or maybe the kid was just really into academics. Its nuanced, I know.
Students take Adderall to study as soon as middle school and high school. Its not about high schools not preparing students. Hell, after getting hours and hours of homework A DAY in highschool, all AP classes, college was a breeze for me. College was boring. But in highschool, where competition was razor-sharp (here in Texas, we have this great thing where the top 10% of each graduating high school class is GUARANTEED to be accepted to the university of their choice. For most, this is the University of Texas. As a result, as much as 90% of UT freshmen class is filled with students in the top 10% graduating. Unfortunately, this means 10% of some middle-of-nowhere class gets guaranteed admission, where the 11th percentile at blue ribbon schools is just screwed over. The remaining non top-10% has to be filled with minorities.)
I saw kids pushing themselves to the limits and using dangerous drugs in order to try to keep up, those at the 11th percentile were trying to do anything they could to reach the 10 percentile. Its not good for education.
Wrong. I just graduated from a university and I know firsthand at least a dozen very intelligent students who used Adderall without a prescription purely in order to keep up with a perceived disadvantage vs other students doing the same, or otherwise unrealistic class expectations. They were most certainly NOT the students slacking off and drinking all the time, partying. Those students failed. These students cared SO MUCH, were SO WORRIED about failing, that they would do physical harm to themselves to keep competitive.
The students do not spend 24/7 at class. The environment contains a great deal more, like the environment at home, sports, friends, clubs. etc.
Your statement is just as absurd. And apparently you've not heard of psychology?
Slashdot Mirror
I feel like this is almost a counterargument, actually. If you can re-arrange the letters in a word other than the first and last, and still read it fine (as has been demonstrated), then doesn't that imply the shape ISN'T the key factor? The shape would be changing, but its still just as recognizable. So its something more than just the shape, no?
Your one word offers very little insight. Yes, PETA is protected under fair use, specifically parody. Good job.
Now, why aren't fan works covered by parody? Why is parody protected so much more than other types of fair use? etc., etc., etc.....
The one-word response is an obvious half-ass. Either try to contribute, or just save yourself the time and don't bother.
Fair enough.
What do you think? Your suggestion that Samsung or Google not going after this patent is a fair argument that it may not be feasible to limit / overturn.
But regardless of the current law, do you feel that a patent on "handles to re-size text" should be a patent-able innovation? Like I said, allowing this sort of patents is going to have a massively detrimental effect on innovation and software development. If something as trivially simple as re-sizing text can be patented, then how is one to be expected to know what is allowed? And doesn't that present a sort of inherent monopoly? Now, only Microsoft can resize text with handles, and everybody else's software either has to be missing features people have come to expect, or has to licence to Microsoft. Imagine if we allowed JK Rowling to patent Boy Wizard Story instead of merely trademarking the name "Harry Potter". Thats it, no more boy wizards, nope. She did it first. Who cares if its a pretty obvious idea, she did it FIRST, so now you have to pay her whatever she thinks is fair.
It seems to me we massively overrate the idea in this country. Implementation is arguably more important. The mere fact that it can be represented in software proves that the idea can be broken down into a series of extremely trivial mathematical steps. We do not allow patents on mathematical formula for a very good reason; if we did, it would completely hamstring math advancement. Furthermore, one can see that mathematical formula are not so much creative art as they are intrinsic to reality, part of our universe already and merely waiting observation and description.
So when a bunch of Nintendo fanboys make their own non-commercial game for fun, they get sent all kinds of angry lawyer letters and told to stop.
So what makes PETA immune? I'm being honest here, I would like to know how the law works out this way. It seems to me if fair use doesn't cover non-commercial use by fans, then big organizations like PETA surely shouldn't be covered; and if PETA is covered, then surely the small grassroots fan projects are too?
I was going to agree with you, but typing up my feelings just got very frustrating. I'll leave it at "I don't want to live on this planet anymore."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=35TbGjt-weA
http://patft.uspto.gov/netacgi/nph-Parser?Sect1=PTO1&Sect2=HITOFF&d=PALL&p=1&u=%2Fnetahtml%2FPTO%2Fsrchnum.htm&r=1&f=G&l=50&s1=6,891,551.PN.&OS=PN/6,891,551&RS=PN/6,891,551 I can't give an example of prior art (that doesn't mean there isn't one, this is a pretty basic idea and somebody may have implemented it in their basement before M$ and just didn't take credit. Lack of evidence is not evidence of lack.)
But, I would like to go ahead and say that this should not be patent-able.
I'm going to preface this with IANAL, certainly not a patent lawyer. I'm just a software developer, trying to interpret the law in the best way my layman understanding can, and also expressing what I feel is morally / ethically right regardless of the current law.
The way I read this patent application, they are describing a method for using handles to re-size a text selection.
They are not claiming to have invented handles.
They are not claiming to have invented selecting text. They give prior art examples of their own work at improving selecting text and others' attempts.
They take credit for a rotation handle, but admit they did not invent rotation, nor handles.
"FIG. 3 depicts a selection area (or selection tool) according to one embodiment of the present invention. The tool may include body 301 and one or more selection handles 302a, b. The body 301 of the selection area may be of any shape, and in the depicted example, is rectangular to account for selected electronic data, such as text, in a document. The body 301 may have an appearance that is distinguishable from non-selected portions and/or items on the electronic document to distinguish selected portions from non-selected portions. Accordingly, the selection body 301 may be an inverse color of the selected text... The selection handles 302 generally allow the user to resize and/or adjust the selection of a portion of data, while maintaining the selection. In some embodiments, the selection handles 302 may be graphical symbols that may be moved to resize a selection body 301. For selecting text, the dragging of a selection handle 302 may increase or decrease portions of the current selection body 301, depending on the particular handle being moved, the direction in which the handle 302 is moved, and the directional flow of the language of the underlying text."
To recap: They came up with the idea for using handles to change a selection area.
Does that give them a patent over using handles to resize a window? I guess not, since it specifies text. Does somebody have a patent on that? Seems to me it shouldn't be patentable, but if it is, then that seems like it would overshadow this patent. You stole our resizing areas for your resizing texts!
Here's the thing: this shouldn't be patent-able. I'm willing to suggest that such an "invention" was inevitable. Given computers increasing use, given large use of text editors, given resizing is A THING, and that people DO IT, and that using handles to resize something is already accepted common practice on computers...
Then using handles to resize text is not an INNOVATION. It is a trivial combination of existing ideas, and such should not be patent-able. This creates a first-come first-served situation where everybody races to get trivial patents and then everybody is prevented from writing any software at all, because other people have patents on things fundamental to development, while you hold patents on things equally fundamental that they would need. Its patent gridlock. This is the exact opposite of "protecting innovation", which is what the patent office claims to facilitate.
Also, I guess this is just how patent law works, but was it really necessary for them to break down how computers wor
He's quoting bioshock.
What is this if not a populist objection to both the traditional parties, and therefor the creation of a new party?
We want to do that. We want to picket wallstreet, stand in front of major businesses, that would be great.But they won't let us. They tell us the park is the designated zone. Then we move to the park. Then they tell us the park is closed. So now where is the "first amendment zone" ? *sigh*
It might also help you not look like a complete fucking retard if you paid attention to the phrase : Protesters can return after the park is cleared.
It might also help you not look like a complete dick if you had some decency, patience, or understanding.
"Anonymous Coward" is accurate.
Just enable Steam Guard, which requires additional authentication from unknown IPs. Boom.
please, they aren't that stupid. They called it 'dontreadme.txt'
If I could mod this 6 Funny I would.
Yes, because public schools are models of efficiency. >_' Maybe your local property tax isn't too bad, but there's federal grant money going to the schools as well, which comes from your income tax.
The GOVERNMENT thinks that we need NPR listeners?
Well, surely not the Republicans!
When was the last time you dealt with government "service" ?
I know AT&T customer support is crap, but people vote with their dollars. Apparently what we want in the modern wal-mart world is the cheapest products possible; services be damned. If you don't like that, go shop somewhere else that prioritizes differently. Me, I'm poor, so I'm okay with losing on service to save money. At least we get choice.
With government, it would be shitty service AND costly.
In the past, we didn't have X. So why do we need X?
You're right, America is absolutely flawless. Why would we try to improve the quality of our lives?
Just as to claim that the person has everything to do with it is absurd.
Can you please be a little more mature? We're not going to get anywhere with these "nuh-uh" style of responses. Waste of time.
Surprise, real life is complicated and nuanced!
Thats a pretty cool idea, but from looking over their site, It seems a little flawed. This only works so long as everybody else is ignorant to the existence of spamgourmet. If somebody was to realize what was up, they could take your frombigcorp.3.spacecowboy@spamgourmet and instead just send it to frombigcorp.20.spacecowboy@spamgourmet, you don't really have much control over that part. It only works if the person treats the email as a normal verbatim email. I can pretty easily write a script that takes anything that matches *@spamgourmet.com and then mangles the front part of it. As long as you keep changing the front part, you could keep spamming the person.
In order for this to be truly robust and defend against spam, they'd have to ONLY allow emails through to disposable addresses that are pre-defined. You login, choose a new keyword, and then tell it how many emails to let through on that keyword. Only the keywords you would set up would work, so it would take an in-feasible amount of brute forcing to get a spam email through without knowing a keyword.
The current implementation is more convenient, but easily exploitable.
This is my first time looking at spamgourmet, if I'm missing something I'd appreciate somebody letting me know.
We didn't have a large amount of middle school kids taking cocaine so they could do their homework. Its a completely different scenario.
Is it shocking that highschool or middleschool kids would do physical harm to themselves to try to keep up academically? YES.
I didn't mean to insinuate that performance enhancing drugs for football was okay. Merely that most kids are more interested in football, band, videogames, etc. than doing academics. My point was, if they're taking performance enhancing drugs for something most kids don't even care about, then things have gotten rather dangerous. At least with football, you could just say the kid himself wanted to win too bad. With academics, it seems more like his parents or his teacher are pushing him too hard. You could also find the coach was pushing the football kid too hard, or maybe the kid was just really into academics. Its nuanced, I know.
Students take Adderall to study as soon as middle school and high school. Its not about high schools not preparing students. Hell, after getting hours and hours of homework A DAY in highschool, all AP classes, college was a breeze for me. College was boring. But in highschool, where competition was razor-sharp (here in Texas, we have this great thing where the top 10% of each graduating high school class is GUARANTEED to be accepted to the university of their choice. For most, this is the University of Texas. As a result, as much as 90% of UT freshmen class is filled with students in the top 10% graduating. Unfortunately, this means 10% of some middle-of-nowhere class gets guaranteed admission, where the 11th percentile at blue ribbon schools is just screwed over. The remaining non top-10% has to be filled with minorities.) I saw kids pushing themselves to the limits and using dangerous drugs in order to try to keep up, those at the 11th percentile were trying to do anything they could to reach the 10 percentile. Its not good for education.
Wrong. I just graduated from a university and I know firsthand at least a dozen very intelligent students who used Adderall without a prescription purely in order to keep up with a perceived disadvantage vs other students doing the same, or otherwise unrealistic class expectations. They were most certainly NOT the students slacking off and drinking all the time, partying. Those students failed. These students cared SO MUCH, were SO WORRIED about failing, that they would do physical harm to themselves to keep competitive.
It doesn't make them the best by a long shot (BlackBerry and Android win that handily)
Truth.
At least, unlike Apple, they give you a legitimate way to do it.
Neither should be acceptable.
The students do not spend 24/7 at class. The environment contains a great deal more, like the environment at home, sports, friends, clubs. etc. Your statement is just as absurd. And apparently you've not heard of psychology?
Yeah, this is honestly offensive. Microsoft, you can do what you like, but don't piss in my face and call it rain.