Yes, duh, the court ruled that the patent is upheld. Only a lawyer would in effect claim "QED" based on that.
Then you weren't paying attention. I was responding to a ridiculous charge that the USPTO was trying to "save face" by issuing a ruling in "legalese." The reexamination mentioned in the article is strictly an administrative proceeding within the USPTO, so passing reexamination does not imply that any court has upheld the patent. The court proceedings were completely separate. But favorable court rulings --> no need to "save face." (QED). The USPTO doesn't care what Slashdot user unity100 thinks of this patent.
"While James Cameron was on a trip to Italy he became very ill with high fever. One night he had a terrible nightmare about a huge robot with red-glowing eyes that was trying to kill him."
Weird that he skipped the red-glowing eyes. But I guess that would've made it too blatantly obvious from the very beginning that Kate Winslet was the evil robot.
If you want to challenge a patent in court, you basically have to either have already been sued, or been threatened to be sued. On the other hand, anybody can challenge a patent in the USPTO, if you can find prior art that raises a "substantial new question of patentability."
As for the courts, all patent cases are heard in federal (i.e., not state) district (i.e., local) courts, which are not specialized. All patent appeals are heard by the CAFC, which is specialized. The judges don't have to be patent attorneys, but the court specializes in patent law. Historically, even the Supreme Court has largely deferred to the CAFC on matters of patent law, but recently they've seem to have decided to take a more active role.
so, they cant come up and say 'we shouldnt have awarded such a blatantly absurd and obvious patent for such a basic action' outright, but are resorting to legalese to save face to invalidate the patent without admitting absurdity of whole u.s. patent system.
No. They re-examined the patent. Some of the claims were allowed to stand. Others had to be amended. The new claims are no more "legalese" than the old claims. There is no "saving face" going on here. The claims have been upheld in court and on appeal at least twice. The PTO doesn't care what you think of it.
Pigs have, so far as I understand, been used for all sorts of science where using humans is not practical or ethical. For instance, if I recall correctly, various pig organs can and are used for human organ transplants. So sure, using pigs for this sort of thing makes sense. However, I do have a question.
Don't forget the Mythbusters. They have frequently used pigs as human analogs.
He wasn't made a co-defendant. He was sanctioned by the court, which is exactly how courts punish misconduct in our legal system. If you refuse to answer discovery, and the other side has to win a motion to compel to get you to respond to what you should have already responded to, then the court has the power to make you pay their fees. This discourages people from gaming the discovery system. You'll note that he isn't jointly and severally liable for all of Tennenbaum's judgment---just the part that pertains to this bone-headed maneuver.
Yeah, unless you read what actually happened, which is that Nesson uploaded the same songs Tennenbaum was accused of uploading and then boasted about it (and linked to it) on his blog. And then when the RIAA served discovery requests asking why he did that, he just responded that it wasn't relevant to the case. Whatever his agenda was, he got no more than he deserved here. I don't care what you think of the RIAA, this was just stupid.
Okay, that's a good start. Now the next step is to map the art you cited to each and every element of the following claim:
1. A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment, the method comprising: monitoring a plurality of activities in a social network environment; storing the plurality of activities in a database; generating a plurality of news items regarding one or more of the activities, wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more viewing users and relates to an activity that was performed by another user; attaching a link associated with at least one of the activities of another user to at least one of the plurality of news items where the link enables a viewing user to participate in the same activity as the another user; limiting access to the plurality of news items to a set of viewing users; and displaying a news feed comprising two or more of the plurality of news items to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewing users.
Once you have done that, you have legitimately complained about a patent.
Still waiting on that single concrete example... (which wouldn't prove your thesis, but at least would be a starting point)
No, you don't have to be a patent attorney to make a meaningful argument about patent law, but you do have to know what you're talking about. When you say things like "this is just status updates on social networking," you make it glaringly obvious that you either don't really know what a patent is, or you do know what it is but you prefer disingenuous hyperbole. So yeah, my opinions are colored by my experience. So are yours. I make a living writing patents for people who think they've come up with something new---everything from artificial intelligence to dog dishes. You make a living doing something else. And yeah, some are more dubious than others. But I like to see my clients succeed, and if I think the law as it now stands entitles them to a patent, them I'm going to fight to get it for them (on the other hand, if I think they're toast, I tell them so and recommend against dumping money into a black hole). And since I like to see my clients succeed, I'm in favor of laws that let more of them succeed. So fine, disagree with me. But do it from a well-informed position.
As for my psychic accusation, I note that you haven't bothered to refute it. Anyway, you obviously care about patents. If you care enough to want to really make a difference, study patents. Read Dennis Crouch's Patently-O (where, indeed, a few of the users are both well-informed and rabidly anti-patent), or pull a few patent file wrappers, and read them from beginning to end. Go to the nearest law school, and read a few sections from Chisum on topics like prior art, IDSs, and Markman hearings. It may or may not change some of your opinions, but your arguments will definitely be more pointed and effective.
The only substantive argument I've seen from you so far is that obvious patents are bad, which has nothing to do with whether software is or should be statutory subject matter. And guess what---I heartily agree with you. Obvious patents are bad. In fact, when I was in law school, I wrote a comment for our law review about improving section 103 by abandoning TSM as "the" test for obviousness and instead adopting a more flexible fact-intensive inquiry, with some presumptions in favor of obviousness in certain cases. I never submitted it for publication, because about that time, the Supreme Court decided KSR and adopted my proposed test almost exactly. Presumably, there are a number of patents that would have been upheld under TSM that will be overturned under KSR. In the meantime, the USPTO under Dudas went hog wild with KSR and starting rejecting applications willy nilly over completely unrelated art as long as it looked like maybe it disclosed some of the claim elements. Nobody who prosecuted patents under the Dudas regime could keep a straight face while making the argument you've made in another thread that prior art is considered too narrowly. Fortunately, Kappos seems to be bringing some sanity back to the USPTO---somewhere between the old TSM and Dudas' KSR++.
You have not addressed my argument, which is that the patent bar has established a sufficiently narrow definition of prior art as to render the term virtually meaningless.
Actually, I have. In fact, I addressed your argument before you even made it. You just aren't listening. I have told you that the patent attorneys I know (including me) will submit anything even remotely or tangentially related to the claims. There is no incentive to try to be clever and look at prior art narrowly. It just weakens your patent. And I doubt that you've ever even read an office action that rejects claims over prior art, much less responded to one. So I'm guessing you don't really know what you're talking about. You've just drunk deeply of the Slashdot kool-aid, so now you "know" that software patents are bad, without (going out on a limb here) having so much as ever read a patent all the way through, or made any attempt to understand the claims. Actually, with your UID as low as it is, you probably mixed the Slashdot kool-aid. But that still doesn't mean you know what you're talking about.
Any software engineer with a reasonable history in the field could cite more sophisticated implementations of the same sort of technology that Facebook just patented going back decades. Every modern publish and subscribe messaging platform on the planet is far more sophisticated, for example.
Then give me a citation, and tell me how it anticipates or makes obvious each and every limitation of the claims, because the title has absolutely no legal significance. I've litigated a patent with the title "Headphoning," but guess what---the patent did not purport to cover any and all headphones. Only the claims matter.
And I'm serious here. For all I know, this could be a lousy patent. There certainly are such things. I haven't looked at the prior art, and I've only glanced over the independent claims. Maybe there's a killer reference the examiner should have looked at. But your sweeping and unsupported statement that prior art is considered too narrowly is in stark contrast to my actual experience prosecuting patents. So if you want to convince me, you're going to have to show me an example of what you're talking about.
But lo and behold, add the term "social networking" to the application, and now none of that is relevant. It is no longer "prior art", due to a trivial change of target audience. Nothing new has actually been invented here (far from it), just a new application for what in software engineering terms is ancient technology. Granting patents for such things is perverse. Ultimately, it makes all of us worse off, and the software patent industry a wart on the body politic, the sooner excised the better. Ambulance chasers look positively respectable by comparison.
And once again, an angry Slashdotter completely misses the entire point of a patent---this is not a patent on "news feed in a social networking application." This is a patent on the claims, which I believe I already adequately explained elsewhere. Come back and talk to me again after you've read the file wrapper (which you can get from the USPTO's website---look for PAIR) and figured out which prior art was ignored that should have been considered.
As for your clever little barb about ambulance chasers, sure, I'll good-naturedly give plaintiffs' attorneys a hard time too, since I'm usually on the other side. But let some big, monied corporation cause you serious injury with its carelessness, and I promise you that the only reason you'll be able to hold it accountable is that there is some "ambulance chaser" willing to take your piddly little case on contingency. And chances are he's not getting rich off of your case. He's working very hard to settle a whole bunch of piddly little cases like yours so he can make a decent living.
Then give me an example. Give me a patent number, tell me which references were disclosed in the IDS, and then point me to a reference that is material to the allowed claims and should have been disclosed that wasn't. And then for good measure, explain to me why the attorney and/or applicant should have been aware of the reference they failed to disclose.
I'm not saying there are bad patents---software or otherwise---but by and large, patent attorneys will submit any piece of art that comes anywhere close to their eyes. They want those references on the face of the patent, because in litigation, it is very, very difficult to overturn a patent on a reference that appears on the face of the patent.
No, I've actually just described the reality of patents in general---it has nothing to do with them being software patents. You can argue that we shouldn't have patents at all, but you would be in such a minority that you would be very unlikely to effect any kind of real change.
Looks like somebody took more than two doses of Benadryl in a 4 -- 6 hour period;-)
But seriously, if you're like about 99% of people, you don't really want to rewind time and go back to your high school girlfriend. She's really not as great as you remember. You're just feeling complacent tedium in your marriage, and in comparison, the hormone-rich buzz of youth seems downright amazing. But did you ever spend years being mildly irritated with how High School Girl squeezes the tooth paste tube? Did you ever have to balance a budget with her so you could take out a mortgage and still afford groceries. Did you ever have to spend dreary months tending to a colicky baby with her and dreading having to get up for work in the morning? Did you ever have to help her decide which kids got new shoes and which kids got hand-me-downs? Did you ever have to figure out how to solve a million tiny little crises and endure a million tiny little irritations that arise over years of being married? I'm guessing not. You still see HSG through the rose-colored glasses of youth and infatuation. But if you could really rewind time and claim her as your own, in twenty years you'd find yourself in exactly the same place---complacent, familiar, not really "unhappy," but definitely feeling like the "buzz" wasn't there any more.
I'm betting if you went home tonight and did something nice for your wife or conscientiously did something to bolster your marriage, instead of trying to work out how to time get back to the 1980s, you'd find you get a lot more "happiness" mileage out of it. Doing something romantic and non-routine with your wife is by far the easier way to bring back the buzz.
As a minimum Google Buzz and Twitter strike me as clearly violating this patent.
Really? I bill tens of hours carefully picking over the specification, the claims, the prosecution history, and the prior art before I ever give my clients an opinion like that, and I never use the word "clearly." "Likely" is about the strongest commitment you'll get, because you don't really know until you've taken the thing to trial and exhausted your appeals.
The problem comes when they sell this to some patent troll who uses it to try to shut down the next big thing that comes along.
Why would they do that if it's as valuable as you think it is?
Even if we can't knock some sense into the patent office and expect them to find every existing example, we can extract a pound of flesh from those that apply for patents already in common usage, by imposing mind numbingly sever financial penalties for failing to mention and dispose of existing art in common usage at the time of application.
Patent applicants and their attorneys are already required to disclose to the patent office any relevant prior art that they're aware of (look up "inequitable conduct"). The penalty for failing to do so is a void patent. If a patentee intentionally held back prior art and then sued a competitor on the bad patent, the trial court could very easily award stiff sanctions. There is absolutely no incentive for holding back known art. Patent attorneys are paranoid about this. If anything, we err far on the side of disclosing stuff that's only marginally relevant rather than be found to have held back prior art. I myself have withdrawn (on the client's instructions) applications that had already been allowed so that we could submit art that we weren't even sure was relevant.
No, not really. That's kind of the point. Claim language has very specific meaning, both within the field of patent law, and within the patent itself. You can't just summarize a claim and say, "well, that's the gist of it," because every single word has an effect on the scope of the claim. If this patent is ever litigated, the parties will spend months and tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars fighting over the definitions of "social network environment, " "news item," and "link." The entire case can hinge on the definition of a single word, and I have seen courts hand down some surprising (and vexing) claim constructions.
So basically, any advice you get from Slashdot armchair lawyers on what these claims "really mean" isn't worth the electrons it's printed on.
It was given a bit more "personality" than any AI would really have, but only to make it interesting on-screen. Sure, you can attribute it's action's to "sentience" but almost all can be traced back to following simplistic rules
I can follow you on this for most of what Joshua does. But at the point where Joshua decides philosophically that his programmed function of launching missiles is futile because the war can't be won, and thus rejects his programming, they pretty much crossed over.
All tech involved was just a small step removed from the real thing.
Um, you do realize that you're talking about a movie with a sentient computer, don't you? Also, the war dialing wasn't even realistic, because the computer had no way to disconnect the phone between calls. He just picked it up off the cradle and put it in the modem, and it magically made a bunch of separate calls.
Why would you go that fast (presuming you can't go much faster, of course)? It takes exponentially more energy to accelerate as you approach the speed of light, but that doesn't get you to your destination all that much faster. At a mere 99.9% of the speed of light, you spend less than one extra hour of travel (externally measured, of course) per month. For a "realistic" trip to nearby stars, that means an extra day and a half out of the 4.37 years to get to Alpha Centauri.
The issue is not the time for an external observer, it's the time for the folks in the ship. The same exponential increase in energy also equals an exponential decrease in time that you, the astronaut, have to spend cooped up in a ship. I remember reading somewhere that if you could keep accelerating so that the internal observer experienced a constant 1g, you could traverse the visible universe in something like a month (feel free to correct me if you have done the actual math). Sure, the rest of the universe will grow old around you, but in the meantime, you only had to pack one bag.
Get a grip people. There haven't been any reports that Apple is banning people who jailbreak their own personal phones, they have banned TWO people who are involved in discovering and propagating exploits for the iPhone. Yes, these hacks are being used to jailbreak but it's a much different thing to ban someone who is actively seeking new ways to break into the iPhone OS than it is to ban someone unlocking their own phone.
If Apple starts banning en-masse people who have jailbroken their iPhones then we can break out the torches and pitchforks. Until then it's a company saying "no more soup for you" to a couple of hackers who are looking to exploit the company's secure system. And yes, I'll be right there with the rest of you if Apple does start pushing around joe average over this issue.
First, they came for the people actively seeking new ways to jailbreak the iPhone, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't actively seeking for new ways to jailbreak the iPhone. Then they came for the people who were pirating apps, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't pirating apps. Then I got tired of smug, sanctimonious, "slipper slope" quotes that people use to try to sound insightful without having to think, and I went and bought another phone.
Specific instructions as to how to do that would only open this post to criticism based on unimportant details, so I'm not going there. Let the principle stand: You, the victim, can break the cycle of abuse. It's absolutely heartbreaking that so many kids don't figure this out before they're 40 years old.
Or just read Ender's Game. Stand up to bullies, put 'em six feet under, destroy planets. All in a day's work for Ender Wiggin.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, duh, the court ruled that the patent is upheld. Only a lawyer would in effect claim "QED" based on that.
Then you weren't paying attention. I was responding to a ridiculous charge that the USPTO was trying to "save face" by issuing a ruling in "legalese." The reexamination mentioned in the article is strictly an administrative proceeding within the USPTO, so passing reexamination does not imply that any court has upheld the patent. The court proceedings were completely separate. But favorable court rulings --> no need to "save face." (QED). The USPTO doesn't care what Slashdot user unity100 thinks of this patent.
"While James Cameron was on a trip to Italy he became very ill with high fever. One night he had a terrible nightmare about a huge robot with red-glowing eyes that was trying to kill him."
Weird that he skipped the red-glowing eyes. But I guess that would've made it too blatantly obvious from the very beginning that Kate Winslet was the evil robot.
If you want to challenge a patent in court, you basically have to either have already been sued, or been threatened to be sued. On the other hand, anybody can challenge a patent in the USPTO, if you can find prior art that raises a "substantial new question of patentability."
As for the courts, all patent cases are heard in federal (i.e., not state) district (i.e., local) courts, which are not specialized. All patent appeals are heard by the CAFC, which is specialized. The judges don't have to be patent attorneys, but the court specializes in patent law. Historically, even the Supreme Court has largely deferred to the CAFC on matters of patent law, but recently they've seem to have decided to take a more active role.
so, they cant come up and say 'we shouldnt have awarded such a blatantly absurd and obvious patent for such a basic action' outright, but are resorting to legalese to save face to invalidate the patent without admitting absurdity of whole u.s. patent system.
No. They re-examined the patent. Some of the claims were allowed to stand. Others had to be amended. The new claims are no more "legalese" than the old claims. There is no "saving face" going on here. The claims have been upheld in court and on appeal at least twice. The PTO doesn't care what you think of it.
If you were a real grammar Nazi, you would have caught the improper use of "begs the question" and realized it was a joke.
Pigs have, so far as I understand, been used for all sorts of science where using humans is not practical or ethical. For instance, if I recall correctly, various pig organs can and are used for human organ transplants. So sure, using pigs for this sort of thing makes sense. However, I do have a question.
Don't forget the Mythbusters. They have frequently used pigs as human analogs.
He wasn't made a co-defendant. He was sanctioned by the court, which is exactly how courts punish misconduct in our legal system. If you refuse to answer discovery, and the other side has to win a motion to compel to get you to respond to what you should have already responded to, then the court has the power to make you pay their fees. This discourages people from gaming the discovery system. You'll note that he isn't jointly and severally liable for all of Tennenbaum's judgment---just the part that pertains to this bone-headed maneuver.
Those with the funds make the rules.
Yeah, unless you read what actually happened, which is that Nesson uploaded the same songs Tennenbaum was accused of uploading and then boasted about it (and linked to it) on his blog. And then when the RIAA served discovery requests asking why he did that, he just responded that it wasn't relevant to the case. Whatever his agenda was, he got no more than he deserved here. I don't care what you think of the RIAA, this was just stupid.
Anyone know?
It's what Facebook was called in 2006.
1. A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment, the method comprising: monitoring a plurality of activities in a social network environment; storing the plurality of activities in a database; generating a plurality of news items regarding one or more of the activities, wherein one or more of the news items is for presentation to one or more viewing users and relates to an activity that was performed by another user; attaching a link associated with at least one of the activities of another user to at least one of the plurality of news items where the link enables a viewing user to participate in the same activity as the another user; limiting access to the plurality of news items to a set of viewing users; and displaying a news feed comprising two or more of the plurality of news items to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewing users.
Once you have done that, you have legitimately complained about a patent.
Still waiting on that single concrete example... (which wouldn't prove your thesis, but at least would be a starting point)
No, you don't have to be a patent attorney to make a meaningful argument about patent law, but you do have to know what you're talking about. When you say things like "this is just status updates on social networking," you make it glaringly obvious that you either don't really know what a patent is, or you do know what it is but you prefer disingenuous hyperbole. So yeah, my opinions are colored by my experience. So are yours. I make a living writing patents for people who think they've come up with something new---everything from artificial intelligence to dog dishes. You make a living doing something else. And yeah, some are more dubious than others. But I like to see my clients succeed, and if I think the law as it now stands entitles them to a patent, them I'm going to fight to get it for them (on the other hand, if I think they're toast, I tell them so and recommend against dumping money into a black hole). And since I like to see my clients succeed, I'm in favor of laws that let more of them succeed. So fine, disagree with me. But do it from a well-informed position.
As for my psychic accusation, I note that you haven't bothered to refute it. Anyway, you obviously care about patents. If you care enough to want to really make a difference, study patents. Read Dennis Crouch's Patently-O (where, indeed, a few of the users are both well-informed and rabidly anti-patent), or pull a few patent file wrappers, and read them from beginning to end. Go to the nearest law school, and read a few sections from Chisum on topics like prior art, IDSs, and Markman hearings. It may or may not change some of your opinions, but your arguments will definitely be more pointed and effective.
The only substantive argument I've seen from you so far is that obvious patents are bad, which has nothing to do with whether software is or should be statutory subject matter. And guess what---I heartily agree with you. Obvious patents are bad. In fact, when I was in law school, I wrote a comment for our law review about improving section 103 by abandoning TSM as "the" test for obviousness and instead adopting a more flexible fact-intensive inquiry, with some presumptions in favor of obviousness in certain cases. I never submitted it for publication, because about that time, the Supreme Court decided KSR and adopted my proposed test almost exactly. Presumably, there are a number of patents that would have been upheld under TSM that will be overturned under KSR. In the meantime, the USPTO under Dudas went hog wild with KSR and starting rejecting applications willy nilly over completely unrelated art as long as it looked like maybe it disclosed some of the claim elements. Nobody who prosecuted patents under the Dudas regime could keep a straight face while making the argument you've made in another thread that prior art is considered too narrowly. Fortunately, Kappos seems to be bringing some sanity back to the USPTO---somewhere between the old TSM and Dudas' KSR++.
You have not addressed my argument, which is that the patent bar has established a sufficiently narrow definition of prior art as to render the term virtually meaningless.
Actually, I have. In fact, I addressed your argument before you even made it. You just aren't listening. I have told you that the patent attorneys I know (including me) will submit anything even remotely or tangentially related to the claims. There is no incentive to try to be clever and look at prior art narrowly. It just weakens your patent. And I doubt that you've ever even read an office action that rejects claims over prior art, much less responded to one. So I'm guessing you don't really know what you're talking about. You've just drunk deeply of the Slashdot kool-aid, so now you "know" that software patents are bad, without (going out on a limb here) having so much as ever read a patent all the way through, or made any attempt to understand the claims. Actually, with your UID as low as it is, you probably mixed the Slashdot kool-aid. But that still doesn't mean you know what you're talking about.
Any software engineer with a reasonable history in the field could cite more sophisticated implementations of the same sort of technology that Facebook just patented going back decades. Every modern publish and subscribe messaging platform on the planet is far more sophisticated, for example.
Then give me a citation, and tell me how it anticipates or makes obvious each and every limitation of the claims, because the title has absolutely no legal significance. I've litigated a patent with the title "Headphoning," but guess what---the patent did not purport to cover any and all headphones. Only the claims matter.
And I'm serious here. For all I know, this could be a lousy patent. There certainly are such things. I haven't looked at the prior art, and I've only glanced over the independent claims. Maybe there's a killer reference the examiner should have looked at. But your sweeping and unsupported statement that prior art is considered too narrowly is in stark contrast to my actual experience prosecuting patents. So if you want to convince me, you're going to have to show me an example of what you're talking about.
But lo and behold, add the term "social networking" to the application, and now none of that is relevant. It is no longer "prior art", due to a trivial change of target audience. Nothing new has actually been invented here (far from it), just a new application for what in software engineering terms is ancient technology. Granting patents for such things is perverse. Ultimately, it makes all of us worse off, and the software patent industry a wart on the body politic, the sooner excised the better. Ambulance chasers look positively respectable by comparison.
And once again, an angry Slashdotter completely misses the entire point of a patent---this is not a patent on "news feed in a social networking application." This is a patent on the claims, which I believe I already adequately explained elsewhere. Come back and talk to me again after you've read the file wrapper (which you can get from the USPTO's website---look for PAIR) and figured out which prior art was ignored that should have been considered.
As for your clever little barb about ambulance chasers, sure, I'll good-naturedly give plaintiffs' attorneys a hard time too, since I'm usually on the other side. But let some big, monied corporation cause you serious injury with its carelessness, and I promise you that the only reason you'll be able to hold it accountable is that there is some "ambulance chaser" willing to take your piddly little case on contingency. And chances are he's not getting rich off of your case. He's working very hard to settle a whole bunch of piddly little cases like yours so he can make a decent living.
Then give me an example. Give me a patent number, tell me which references were disclosed in the IDS, and then point me to a reference that is material to the allowed claims and should have been disclosed that wasn't. And then for good measure, explain to me why the attorney and/or applicant should have been aware of the reference they failed to disclose.
I'm not saying there are bad patents---software or otherwise---but by and large, patent attorneys will submit any piece of art that comes anywhere close to their eyes. They want those references on the face of the patent, because in litigation, it is very, very difficult to overturn a patent on a reference that appears on the face of the patent.
No, I've actually just described the reality of patents in general---it has nothing to do with them being software patents. You can argue that we shouldn't have patents at all, but you would be in such a minority that you would be very unlikely to effect any kind of real change.
Looks like somebody took more than two doses of Benadryl in a 4 -- 6 hour period ;-)
But seriously, if you're like about 99% of people, you don't really want to rewind time and go back to your high school girlfriend. She's really not as great as you remember. You're just feeling complacent tedium in your marriage, and in comparison, the hormone-rich buzz of youth seems downright amazing. But did you ever spend years being mildly irritated with how High School Girl squeezes the tooth paste tube? Did you ever have to balance a budget with her so you could take out a mortgage and still afford groceries. Did you ever have to spend dreary months tending to a colicky baby with her and dreading having to get up for work in the morning? Did you ever have to help her decide which kids got new shoes and which kids got hand-me-downs? Did you ever have to figure out how to solve a million tiny little crises and endure a million tiny little irritations that arise over years of being married? I'm guessing not. You still see HSG through the rose-colored glasses of youth and infatuation. But if you could really rewind time and claim her as your own, in twenty years you'd find yourself in exactly the same place---complacent, familiar, not really "unhappy," but definitely feeling like the "buzz" wasn't there any more.
I'm betting if you went home tonight and did something nice for your wife or conscientiously did something to bolster your marriage, instead of trying to work out how to time get back to the 1980s, you'd find you get a lot more "happiness" mileage out of it. Doing something romantic and non-routine with your wife is by far the easier way to bring back the buzz.
Sure, I might be wrong. But I might not be.
As a minimum Google Buzz and Twitter strike me as clearly violating this patent.
Really? I bill tens of hours carefully picking over the specification, the claims, the prosecution history, and the prior art before I ever give my clients an opinion like that, and I never use the word "clearly." "Likely" is about the strongest commitment you'll get, because you don't really know until you've taken the thing to trial and exhausted your appeals.
The problem comes when they sell this to some patent troll who uses it to try to shut down the next big thing that comes along.
Why would they do that if it's as valuable as you think it is?
Even if we can't knock some sense into the patent office and expect them to find every existing example, we can extract a pound of flesh from those that apply for patents already in common usage, by imposing mind numbingly sever financial penalties for failing to mention and dispose of existing art in common usage at the time of application.
Patent applicants and their attorneys are already required to disclose to the patent office any relevant prior art that they're aware of (look up "inequitable conduct"). The penalty for failing to do so is a void patent. If a patentee intentionally held back prior art and then sued a competitor on the bad patent, the trial court could very easily award stiff sanctions. There is absolutely no incentive for holding back known art. Patent attorneys are paranoid about this. If anything, we err far on the side of disclosing stuff that's only marginally relevant rather than be found to have held back prior art. I myself have withdrawn (on the client's instructions) applications that had already been allowed so that we could submit art that we weren't even sure was relevant.
Can someone turn that into English?
No, not really. That's kind of the point. Claim language has very specific meaning, both within the field of patent law, and within the patent itself. You can't just summarize a claim and say, "well, that's the gist of it," because every single word has an effect on the scope of the claim. If this patent is ever litigated, the parties will spend months and tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars fighting over the definitions of "social network environment, " "news item," and "link." The entire case can hinge on the definition of a single word, and I have seen courts hand down some surprising (and vexing) claim constructions.
So basically, any advice you get from Slashdot armchair lawyers on what these claims "really mean" isn't worth the electrons it's printed on.
It was given a bit more "personality" than any AI would really have, but only to make it interesting on-screen. Sure, you can attribute it's action's to "sentience" but almost all can be traced back to following simplistic rules
I can follow you on this for most of what Joshua does. But at the point where Joshua decides philosophically that his programmed function of launching missiles is futile because the war can't be won, and thus rejects his programming, they pretty much crossed over.
All tech involved was just a small step removed from the real thing.
Um, you do realize that you're talking about a movie with a sentient computer, don't you? Also, the war dialing wasn't even realistic, because the computer had no way to disconnect the phone between calls. He just picked it up off the cradle and put it in the modem, and it magically made a bunch of separate calls.
If linux were just RedHat, it could never have become Ubuntu.
Wait, where's the part where you list an advantage of decentralization?
Why would you go that fast (presuming you can't go much faster, of course)? It takes exponentially more energy to accelerate as you approach the speed of light, but that doesn't get you to your destination all that much faster. At a mere 99.9% of the speed of light, you spend less than one extra hour of travel (externally measured, of course) per month. For a "realistic" trip to nearby stars, that means an extra day and a half out of the 4.37 years to get to Alpha Centauri.
The issue is not the time for an external observer, it's the time for the folks in the ship. The same exponential increase in energy also equals an exponential decrease in time that you, the astronaut, have to spend cooped up in a ship. I remember reading somewhere that if you could keep accelerating so that the internal observer experienced a constant 1g, you could traverse the visible universe in something like a month (feel free to correct me if you have done the actual math). Sure, the rest of the universe will grow old around you, but in the meantime, you only had to pack one bag.
Get a grip people. There haven't been any reports that Apple is banning people who jailbreak their own personal phones, they have banned TWO people who are involved in discovering and propagating exploits for the iPhone. Yes, these hacks are being used to jailbreak but it's a much different thing to ban someone who is actively seeking new ways to break into the iPhone OS than it is to ban someone unlocking their own phone.
If Apple starts banning en-masse people who have jailbroken their iPhones then we can break out the torches and pitchforks. Until then it's a company saying "no more soup for you" to a couple of hackers who are looking to exploit the company's secure system. And yes, I'll be right there with the rest of you if Apple does start pushing around joe average over this issue.
First, they came for the people actively seeking new ways to jailbreak the iPhone, and I didn't speak up because I wasn't actively seeking for new ways to jailbreak the iPhone. Then they came for the people who were pirating apps, and I didn't speak up, because I wasn't pirating apps. Then I got tired of smug, sanctimonious, "slipper slope" quotes that people use to try to sound insightful without having to think, and I went and bought another phone.
Specific instructions as to how to do that would only open this post to criticism based on unimportant details, so I'm not going there. Let the principle stand: You, the victim, can break the cycle of abuse. It's absolutely heartbreaking that so many kids don't figure this out before they're 40 years old.
Or just read Ender's Game. Stand up to bullies, put 'em six feet under, destroy planets. All in a day's work for Ender Wiggin.
No, I'm going to call you Betty.