The USPTO.gov server seems a bit slow today, so here are the patents from Delphion: 4496395 (a method of tempering magnets), 4851058 (material composition), 4802931 (another material composition), 5411608 (yet another composition), 4902361 (even more composition), and especially 5172751 (more tempering). As usual, look at the first few claims to get a general idea of the scope of the patent.
Saying "I'm sorry, could you resend that as Word 95 format please?" isn't an option with some clients.
But you can say "I'm sorry, could you send me the source code for that format's reader please?" or "I'm sorry, could you resend that as plain text, HTML, LaTeX, or gzipped PostScript format please?" if you have made it clear to your clients that your company embraces (not in the MS sense) standards and not proprietary formats whose maintainers have threatened to sue you (countersuits on grounds of legal harassment are not common in the States) should you reverse-engineer them.
have W3C standards ever meant that I can get solid cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility on my (correctly coded) web pages, six months, a year, two years down the line?
The major fifth-generation web browsers (Mozilla, IE 5.x, Konqueror, Opera, etc.) support most of CSS1 and CSS2. If a page crashes 4.x browsers, that's the fault of the 4.x browser user for not installing a 5.x browser. 5.x browsers don't use that much more resources than 4.x browsers; see also Galeon and K-Meleon.
If people use shitty browsers, that's their problem.
I've been doing that for 21 years. Where do I apply for my game design job?
You should have a sense of what makes a good level and what makes a bad level. Start at testing in any game house that's hiring. You could get promoted to assistant level designer.
Read the replies scored 0 then ask that question aloud once more
You can't read at threshold=0 if Slashdot is in Overload mode and is serving only static pages at threshold=1. Any attempt to change/article.pl's threshold or to get/comments.pl at all redirects you to the homepage.
Nowadays, the major expensive (power and $$$) components of a laptop include the backlit color TFT display and the drives (and perhaps the RAM), not the CPU.
The low end stagnates because of lack of applications for things that would otherwise trickle down from the high end. What do you need 1 GHz for (other than FPS playing or video editing, neither of which is reasonable in a mobile setting)?
Computer != PC. Palm and CE devices are computers too; they just don't have rotating storage or a full-size keyboard. DVD players and several other devices contain contain DSPs.
the P3 was (is?) not properly designed to run at 1000MHz, instead it's upper limit was designed to be approx. 600-800MHz. I have been led to believe that this has something to do with the transistors
Explanation: As the CPU fabrication[0] process shrinks, transistors and other components become smaller ergo have less capacitance ergo run faster. Another explanation: Between the initial design of the P6 core and its use in later PIII processors, it was optimized to have a shorter critical path ergo a shorter cycle time.
[0] Fabrication in AMD's case refers to manufacturing. In Intel's case, it refers to falsehoods such as "P4 is faster than its largest competitor (i.e. Athlon)."
BTW, it's not that hard for a dedicated individual to write a video driver shim.
Microsoft has already addressed the audio side of this issue with the Secure Audio Path (can't play encrypted content through drivers not cryptographically signed by Microsoft). Who's to say they're not working on the video side?
How is releasing the teaser different from all these free demos commercial companies make available to the public ?
The difference is that the full version is shipped only when there are enough paid orders for the full version to ensure that the developers can eat; once the first shipment is out, the advantage of buying the CD is that you get tech support and access to fast servers on which to play the game.
Come on, you know damn well that if people can download programs or copy music CDs from their friends without breaking the law, it will be end of industry.
It will be the end of the twentieth-century music industry as we know it, but not the end of making a living off recorded music. MP3.com is already starting to go this way (payback for playback, and D.A.M. CDs).
usually respected as part of an agreement between the content production and retail industries.
The requirement of permission (your "agreement") from the copyright owner to deal in used entertainment media means there are tall barriers to entry to the market ("We have exclusive rights to Sony media in this market; no soup for you").
IANAL, but if they gave me unlimited access, including no bandwidth restrictions
What if no ISP in your town makes such a contract available?
More accurate estimate of number of melodies
on
Ring-Tone Royalties
·
· Score: 2
371574977536 possible tunes
Information theory states that anything for which there are fewer than 2^40 (approx. 10^12) possibilities can be encoded in 40 bits. How's that for compression? They don't even make encryption keys that short anymore. (Or is this the MPAA's argument, that the 40-bit title key on a CSS encrypted DVD is copyrighted?) In the world of words, where a letter has about 2 or 3 bits of entropy to keep things pronounceable, things that short are trademarked, not copyrighted. (This opens up another can of worms.)
Here's another ballpark estimate: Take 6 choices for the next note (no accidentals, no adjacent repetitions, disregard rhythm) and you get a smaller number of melodies. Allow that all melodies can be transposed to start on C, and you get 6^(n - 1) melodies of n notes. This formula that gives only 6^7 = 279,936 possible eight-note melodies, representable in 19 bits. There are an order of magnitude more unexpired U.S. patents than eight-note diatonic melodies.
All you really need to do is get some hard drive space, write a script to output all the permutations, copyright it, and then sue anyone who "dares" to use your "original" work.
I've analyzed this situation before and given a formula for the number of possible melodies with x notes. I've also written programs that use music theory to generate random but pleasing contrapuntal music on the fly.
Secondly, how much of a song does a phone have to play before it becomes copyright infringement? A bar? A chorus?
The Yes! We Have No Bananas! case dealt with this very issue (a song's four-note hook was copied), but I forget which way it went.
"Drugs" vs. "illegal drugs"
on
Cracking OSX
·
· Score: 3
you don't see drug store owners writing angry letters to the editor explaining that this sort of thing gives them a bad name and that the journalist should have used "substances of an illicit nature".
If journalists call such substances "illegal drugs," why can't they call cracking "illegal hacking"?
The public domain is a constant finite set
on
Ring-Tone Royalties
·
· Score: 2
In any case, my point is only salient to music in the PD
This set of music is limited and will not become larger. The major source of additions to the public domain has previously been expirations of copyright terms. However, since the late 1970s, effectively NOTHING has expired into the public domain. The only significant thing that can potentially stop this is the death of the Walt Disney Company, as all senators and representatives have a price, and DisneyCo has enough money to buy them.
Not if the plugin opens DirectX and puts the image in an overlay, or goes full-screen and traps all keys but Ctrl+Alt+Del.
(even if they try to stop me from doing that, I can always directly read the video memory or something and circumvent their protection
And go to jail for posting this information on Slashdot. (You're posting it on a U.S. operated web site; therefore you're posting it in the U.S. under U.S. jurisdiction, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.)
People are using JavaScript to prevent viewers from using the right mouse button to save a picture
Blocking contextual menus is more trouble than it's worth (read more). (Circumvent it in IE by holding down the right mouse button and pressing Enter, or choosing File : Save As... : Web page complete. Circumvent it anywhere by wgetting the page and its images.) And it pisses some people off enough to make them write right-click shit lists.
And tell what is so wrong about protecting ones revenue? I mean, if we think that making profit is illegal
The existence of the Free Software Movement (and its children Free Music, Free Documentation, etc.) and of the Street Performer Protocol (release the teaser, take orders for the full version, release the full version once you have enough orders) show that money can be made in the content industry without restrictions against sharing the product.
Clarification: Parent code fragment assumes that datatype 'int' has at least 2049 bits of unsigned integer precision (j holds values from 0 to 2^2048 and is used as an int in printf()). This is not feasible on any current hardware.
Not after the conclusion of The Time Machine. Extrapolating from the events of the story, the Eloi (who look like Precious Moments figurines) rediscover fire and kick the Morlocks to high heck.
shouldn't your high school's filtering software have kept you from slashdot?
If all file sharing were stopped at the ISP level, people would find new ISP's
Once you're booted off both your local cable provider and DSL provider for running a bandwidth-hogging server (even if you're serving up Free content) on their severly oversold network, the only option left is to move to another area. This can cost six figures (or, in your case, eight Japanese figures).
I don't have to worry about any of this. I live in Japan
Whose copyright law doesn't even recognize a right of "first sale." For example, it is ILLEGAL in Japan to sell used video tapes, DVDs, and entertainment software.
Even then, correct me if im wrong, but I can go and code a program that utilizies 1024 bit encryption and that is still legal too. As long as i do not export it. Isn't it?
Restrictions on retail software and Free software (yes, there is much overlap) have been greatly relaxed. If you write a Free crypto library, you can release the source code without too much red tape (mostly it's just a fax to BXA).
(Read More... at the Bureau of Export Administration)
Slashdot Mirror
The USPTO.gov server seems a bit slow today, so here are the patents from Delphion: 4496395 (a method of tempering magnets), 4851058 (material composition), 4802931 (another material composition), 5411608 (yet another composition), 4902361 (even more composition), and especially 5172751 (more tempering). As usual, look at the first few claims to get a general idea of the scope of the patent.
(Who's Dennis?)Saying "I'm sorry, could you resend that as Word 95 format please?" isn't an option with some clients.
But you can say "I'm sorry, could you send me the source code for that format's reader please?" or "I'm sorry, could you resend that as plain text, HTML, LaTeX, or gzipped PostScript format please?" if you have made it clear to your clients that your company embraces (not in the MS sense) standards and not proprietary formats whose maintainers have threatened to sue you (countersuits on grounds of legal harassment are not common in the States) should you reverse-engineer them.
Years back electronics companies used to give a schematic with their product, yet those items still game with a warranty.
In that case, the warranty was that "This hardware matches the schematic, and this schematic describes hardware that performs task Foo."
have W3C standards ever meant that I can get solid cross-platform, cross-browser compatibility on my (correctly coded) web pages, six months, a year, two years down the line?
The major fifth-generation web browsers (Mozilla, IE 5.x, Konqueror, Opera, etc.) support most of CSS1 and CSS2. If a page crashes 4.x browsers, that's the fault of the 4.x browser user for not installing a 5.x browser. 5.x browsers don't use that much more resources than 4.x browsers; see also Galeon and K-Meleon.
If people use shitty browsers, that's their problem.
I've been doing that for 21 years. Where do I apply for my game design job?
You should have a sense of what makes a good level and what makes a bad level. Start at testing in any game house that's hiring. You could get promoted to assistant level designer.
Read the replies scored 0 then ask that question aloud once more
You can't read at threshold=0 if Slashdot is in Overload mode and is serving only static pages at threshold=1. Any attempt to change /article.pl's threshold or to get /comments.pl at all redirects you to the homepage.
The cheapest laptops have been around $1000 forever now. When can I buy one for $500?
the P3 was (is?) not properly designed to run at 1000MHz, instead it's upper limit was designed to be approx. 600-800MHz. I have been led to believe that this has something to do with the transistors
Explanation: As the CPU fabrication[0] process shrinks, transistors and other components become smaller ergo have less capacitance ergo run faster. Another explanation: Between the initial design of the P6 core and its use in later PIII processors, it was optimized to have a shorter critical path ergo a shorter cycle time.
[0] Fabrication in AMD's case refers to manufacturing. In Intel's case, it refers to falsehoods such as "P4 is faster than its largest competitor (i.e. Athlon)."Maybe their prime directive doesn't allow them to interact with us yet.
SETI@home isn't looking for communication.
oR MAYBE I've been watching too much of Star trek
Try Star Wars, as in SDI and Son of SDI. SETI is looking for signals with strong carriers such as military radar.
BTW, it's not that hard for a dedicated individual to write a video driver shim.
Microsoft has already addressed the audio side of this issue with the Secure Audio Path (can't play encrypted content through drivers not cryptographically signed by Microsoft). Who's to say they're not working on the video side?
How is releasing the teaser different from all these free demos commercial companies make available to the public ?
The difference is that the full version is shipped only when there are enough paid orders for the full version to ensure that the developers can eat; once the first shipment is out, the advantage of buying the CD is that you get tech support and access to fast servers on which to play the game.
Come on, you know damn well that if people can download programs or copy music CDs from their friends without breaking the law, it will be end of industry.
It will be the end of the twentieth-century music industry as we know it, but not the end of making a living off recorded music. MP3.com is already starting to go this way (payback for playback, and D.A.M. CDs).
usually respected as part of an agreement between the content production and retail industries.
The requirement of permission (your "agreement") from the copyright owner to deal in used entertainment media means there are tall barriers to entry to the market ("We have exclusive rights to Sony media in this market; no soup for you").
IANAL, but if they gave me unlimited access, including no bandwidth restrictions
What if no ISP in your town makes such a contract available?
371574977536 possible tunes
Information theory states that anything for which there are fewer than 2^40 (approx. 10^12) possibilities can be encoded in 40 bits. How's that for compression? They don't even make encryption keys that short anymore. (Or is this the MPAA's argument, that the 40-bit title key on a CSS encrypted DVD is copyrighted?) In the world of words, where a letter has about 2 or 3 bits of entropy to keep things pronounceable, things that short are trademarked, not copyrighted. (This opens up another can of worms.)
Here's another ballpark estimate: Take 6 choices for the next note (no accidentals, no adjacent repetitions, disregard rhythm) and you get a smaller number of melodies. Allow that all melodies can be transposed to start on C, and you get 6^(n - 1) melodies of n notes. This formula that gives only 6^7 = 279,936 possible eight-note melodies, representable in 19 bits. There are an order of magnitude more unexpired U.S. patents than eight-note diatonic melodies.
All you really need to do is get some hard drive space, write a script to output all the permutations, copyright it, and then sue anyone who "dares" to use your "original" work.
I've analyzed this situation before and given a formula for the number of possible melodies with x notes. I've also written programs that use music theory to generate random but pleasing contrapuntal music on the fly.
Secondly, how much of a song does a phone have to play before it becomes copyright infringement? A bar? A chorus?
The Yes! We Have No Bananas! case dealt with this very issue (a song's four-note hook was copied), but I forget which way it went.
you don't see drug store owners writing angry letters to the editor explaining that this sort of thing gives them a bad name and that the journalist should have used "substances of an illicit nature".
If journalists call such substances "illegal drugs," why can't they call cracking "illegal hacking"?
In any case, my point is only salient to music in the PD
This set of music is limited and will not become larger. The major source of additions to the public domain has previously been expirations of copyright terms. However, since the late 1970s, effectively NOTHING has expired into the public domain. The only significant thing that can potentially stop this is the death of the Walt Disney Company, as all senators and representatives have a price, and DisneyCo has enough money to buy them.
it's always possible to make a screenshot
Not if the plugin opens DirectX and puts the image in an overlay, or goes full-screen and traps all keys but Ctrl+Alt+Del.
(even if they try to stop me from doing that, I can always directly read the video memory or something and circumvent their protection
And go to jail for posting this information on Slashdot. (You're posting it on a U.S. operated web site; therefore you're posting it in the U.S. under U.S. jurisdiction, including the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.)
People are using JavaScript to prevent viewers from using the right mouse button to save a picture
Blocking contextual menus is more trouble than it's worth (read more). (Circumvent it in IE by holding down the right mouse button and pressing Enter, or choosing File : Save As... : Web page complete. Circumvent it anywhere by wgetting the page and its images.) And it pisses some people off enough to make them write right-click shit lists.
And tell what is so wrong about protecting ones revenue? I mean, if we think that making profit is illegal
The existence of the Free Software Movement (and its children Free Music, Free Documentation, etc.) and of the Street Performer Protocol (release the teaser, take orders for the full version, release the full version once you have enough orders) show that money can be made in the content industry without restrictions against sharing the product.
Clarification: Parent code fragment assumes that datatype 'int' has at least 2049 bits of unsigned integer precision (j holds values from 0 to 2^2048 and is used as an int in printf()). This is not feasible on any current hardware.
Morlocks eat Eloi
Not after the conclusion of The Time Machine . Extrapolating from the events of the story, the Eloi (who look like Precious Moments figurines) rediscover fire and kick the Morlocks to high heck.
shouldn't your high school's filtering software have kept you from slashdot?
Schools are starting to drop censorware because they're finding that it just doesn't work as advertised.
If all file sharing were stopped at the ISP level, people would find new ISP's
Once you're booted off both your local cable provider and DSL provider for running a bandwidth-hogging server (even if you're serving up Free content) on their severly oversold network, the only option left is to move to another area. This can cost six figures (or, in your case, eight Japanese figures).
I don't have to worry about any of this. I live in Japan
Whose copyright law doesn't even recognize a right of "first sale." For example, it is ILLEGAL in Japan to sell used video tapes, DVDs, and entertainment software.
Even then, correct me if im wrong, but I can go and code a program that utilizies 1024 bit encryption and that is still legal too. As long as i do not export it. Isn't it?
Restrictions on retail software and Free software (yes, there is much overlap) have been greatly relaxed. If you write a Free crypto library, you can release the source code without too much red tape (mostly it's just a fax to BXA).
(Read More... at the Bureau of Export Administration)