Right now, a patent can only be rejected if it is obvious, if there is prior art, or if it doesn't describe the invention in enough detail. If a patent examiner is handed a patent that is precise but incomprehensible, he has no grounds on which to reject it. I propose the following be added to the policies of the USPTO:
A patent shall be rejected if it either
- fails to use standard terminology where appropriate, in a way that makes reading of the patent more difficult
- describes aspects of the invention which are minor or irrelevant but not novel in excessive and unnecessary detail, or
- is in any other obfuscated, in the opinion of the examiner.
The typical patent is a very long description using precise but completely non-standard terms. Patents spell out in detail things that a person in the field would use one or two words for, and as a result, patents are hard to read, hard to search and hard to judge. Bad patents slip through the cracks not because the patent examiners don't know what they're doing, but because the patents themselves are extremely difficult to read.
What if TSR had patented "hit points?" Or, "the idea that one hit doesn't kill the player"?
Fortunately, such things are not patentable. They would have if they could, and in fact, they pissed a lot of people off by trying to enforce a trademark on hit points. (They asked people to use "hits to kill" instead, which never caught on). They also sent takedown notices to various fan sites for fan-created but D&D-related content, and claimed copyright over some things that they'd obviously copied from mythology. TSR was everything that Slashdot loves to hate, and the hate contributed to their eventual demise.
No, not totally safe. Too much gatorade (high sugar content) can kill insulin-dependent diabetics too. In fact, I'd argue that that change would be statistically more likely to cause deaths and serious injury in this type of competition.
You're wrong about that. Speaking as a type 1 diabetic, I can tell you that anyone with diabetes would have enough training and warnings from their own doctor that they wouldn't enter such a competition, and anyone who *didn't* know they had diabetes would be able to handle it. And furthermore, high blood sugar causes obvious, call-a-doctor-NOW symptoms long before it becomes life threatening. Switching to gatorade would have made the competition safe.
In practice, quantum cryptography doesn't achieve anything that regular crypto systems like SSL or ipsec don't. Quantum cryptography is theoretically unbreakable, whereas SSL is believed but not mathematically proven to be unbreakable. In either case, it's easiest for an attacker to compromise one of the endpoints, so it's not a big difference. SSL is cheap, easy and widely deployed. So why would anyone spend $100,000+ per link on untested quantum cryptography hardware, when you could roll out ipsec much more cheaply?
I think the problem people have with misused words/phrases is that as the language evolves to accept the distorted meaning, it reduces our ability to make nuanced distinctions. Reduced granularity if you will.
Not true. Languages do lose distinctions over time, some *much* more significant than this one. However, we invent new ones at about the same rate. There is *always* a way to say what you want to say unambiguously. Worst case, you invent a phrase yourself, and if the language needs it, it will catch on.
It's very unlikely that someone would try to rig the vote for town mayor. But what if the machine were selectively droping votes for a specific senator or representative? Messing up the other questions on the ballot would be a side effect.
I'd say they were left off because collecting data on a country takes time and effort, and research projects like this one have limited budgets. There are a lot of countries that could've been included, but including all of them would require gathering a lot more data.
Provide a way to get a list of all the loaded extensions and plugins, and how much memory each is using. That will silence all the people who install memory-leaking extensions and complain that FF itself leaks memory, and also force the authors of those extensions to fix the leaks.
That is an only-slightly-less-common misconception. The electrons are zipping right along, but not in a consistent direction, so they don't get anywhere fast. The actual velocity of an electric, the drift velocity, and the group velocity are three very different numbers.
Well, sure, but what we care about is the average velocity over a reasonable period of time, which is very close to zero. Since velocity is a vector, we can just look at where the electron started and where it ended up; we don't care what path it took.
The current doesn't actually flow at the speed of light, because not all the electrons are moving in a straight line down the wire. So even though the electrons are moving at the speed of light, the net velocity of the charge is some fraction thereof.
This is a common misconception. The electrons are NOT moving at a significant fraction of the speed of light, in fact they barely move at all. What travels at around 0.3c is the electric potential. When you apply a potential (add electrons to) to your end of the wire, those electrons push electrons that were in the wire, which push electrons that were further along the wire, and so on over to the other end. None of the electrons has to move very far for this to happen.
Sony decides that including both a motion sensor and a motor would add too much to the cost of an already-too-expensive console, and rumble is out of style anyways. (You don't want rumble in a wireless controller because it's bad for battery life, and the current trend is towards wireless). So rumble is cut from the feature list.
So Immersion Corporation, bitter that they didn't get the contract to design the PS3 controller and sensing an opportunity to gain press, responds by badmouthing Sony. Real professional.
Corruption of 'owned'. Someone made a typo, and the typo became popular. (Guess this says something about AOL, or/., when typos become more popular than correct spellings.)
'Pwned' may have started as a typo, but it's now a full-fledged word with a different meaning than 'owned'. Compare:
I owned that car. (That car used to be mine, before I sold it)
I pwned that car. (We were racing, and I left it way behind)
First there was the slang word "ownage", which means dominance, and is only loosely related to the verb "own". Once ownage was widely used, people started using it in other forms: own, owned, owning. These are spelled and pronounced the same as the non-slang verb to own, but are not the same word in people's minds. This sort of thing happens all the time in languages, and what tends to happen is that people look for a way to separate the two words. Then a few people started using "pwned" satirically (to say, "I'm using this word in the sense a person who can't type would use it"). Well, pwn (pronounced "pone") just so happens to be a syllable with no widespread meaning, which makes it prime real estate for a new word to form. So when a few people started using "pwned", it caught on quickly and replaced the slang meaning of "owned". Voila, a new word is born. In a few years its spelling will probably be normalized to "powned", and then it'll be here to stay.
So far, we've got posts bashing the slashdot article for not being current, bashing the Rolling Stone article for being by Rolling Stone, and a few posts of "it's not that bad, get over it". We remember the Florida 2000 fiasco, which was much ado about nothing, and assume this is the same.
It's not.
Seriously, read the article. This isn't just about a few dirty tricks, although there are plenty of those. It isn't about a few thousand votes, like Florida was. It's about outright, large-scale ballot stuffing, hundreds of thousands of votes, fraudulent manipulation of voter rolls, and deliberate sabotage by the Republican secretary of state (who was also the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee).
It's an extraordinary claim, which does indeed require extraordinary evidence, but the evidence IS there. But no one's willing to look at the naked emperor. Everyone made up their mind about whether Bush was good or bad a long time ago, but now the Bush-supporters have no defense but to close their eyes and plug their ears. And for the most part, they're doing exactly that.
So let me get this straight: If someone produces some sort of product and puts a bunch of limitations on how I can or cannot use said product that instead of disregarding those limitations and doing what I want that I should actually either respect those limitations or do without the product altogether? And are you also saying that if I do decide to disregard those limitations placed on the product that a reasonable avenue of recourse for the producer of that product is to bring suit against me?
No one's saying that. The GPL doesn't have any restrictions on how you can use a program. It restricts how you can *redistribute* that program. The default under copyright law is no copying and no redistribution is allowed. GPL says you can copy and redistribute, under the conditions that you include source code under the same license, and credit the previous authors. IChessU does neither. That's plagiarism and copyright infringement.
Static analysis tools like the one used to produce this list tend to produce lots of false positives, because they can't make as many assumptions as a programmer who knows what's going on, and they can't follow most interactions between different modules. So the headline should be "611 *possible* defects, 71 *possible* vulnerabilities" found. More likely, a small handful of those will turn out to be real (but minor) bugs, and the rest will be bogus.
Some PC manufacturers skimp badly on RAM, even though it's cheap. Insufficient RAM is one of the few things that will make a modern computer perform badly as a desktop. By saying "Windows Vista requires 1GB RAM", Microsoft is really saying "manufacturers, stop giving users only 256MB!" Obviously Windows itself won't use 1GB of memory, but some applications will, and poor performance makes Microsoft (as well as the PC manufacturer) look bad.
As for the 128MB video card requirement, this is another area where PC manufacturers are overly stingy. Developers shouldn't have to worry about substandard integrated graphics chipsets, they should be able to program to a reasonable lowest common denominator. Microsoft wants to make sure no one is below that common denominator.
Basically, Microsoft is claiming as hardware requirements, not what Windows itself needs, but what they think programmers should be able to take for granted. It's all cheap hardware anyways, and it will only get cheaper in the future, so leaving some old systems unsupported is no big deal in the long run.
Obviously spelling code out punctuation with clumsy punctuation words won't do. This program cuts out some of the punctuation, but the real solution is to assign proper (single-syllable) abbreviations, in patterns which allow you to combine them into words wherever you'd want to. If you don't worry about sounding like English you can have a single syllable for every punctuation mark and editor command, plus syllables for "start transcribing string literal"-type commands. It would be easy to learn and you'd eventually learn to speak it like a fluent second language. Why say "is less than" like in the article when you could say "les"? You'd also have syllables for common editor commands, things like "transcribe string literal", and so on. Integrate it with autocomplete and it's as good as (maybe better than) typing.
Since the case only starts in 2008, this is largely dependent on who is elected president that year.
Actually, I rather doubt that. The case against Microsoft lost steam when Bush entered office because the federal government was one of the parties in the case. But for AMD v Intel, there's really nothing the White House can do to influence the result.
The root problem is that patents are written so obtusely that neither examiners nor companies nor judges can really tell what they cover. The solution is to force companies to write their patents properly, by creating a penalty for using nonstandard terminology, fluff, etc. That would prevent lots of bad patents (they'd be more easily recognized), and reduce the mess the remainder make.
The report comes up with the $900 estimate by summing up cost estimates for each of the components, but its estimates for the prices of those components is overly pessimistic. In particular, it predicts that the Blu-Ray drive will cost $350 initially (!?), that the CPU will cost $230 initially, and that the unit will not be sold at a loss. They don't say how they arrived at those, but $350 for an optical drive in bulk is not believable at all. If Blu-Ray drives cost anywhere near that much, then the PS3 will ship without them. A more reasonable estimate is that the PS3 will cost $500 at launch, and come down to $300 quickly.
Unless you're ordering a hundred bazillion, you don't get custom chips made, you use mass-produced programmable chips. Making custom chips requires a hugely expensive setup process, so it's extremely unlikely to be cheaper or better in any way.
I can't imagine math being much easier in comp sci, comp sci is pretty much applied math.
I have heard this said many times, but only by math professors. Comp Sci is not applied math, it is a separate field which happens to use mathematical techniques from time to time.
Slashdot Mirror
Right now, a patent can only be rejected if it is obvious, if there is prior art, or if it doesn't describe the invention in enough detail. If a patent examiner is handed a patent that is precise but incomprehensible, he has no grounds on which to reject it. I propose the following be added to the policies of the USPTO:
A patent shall be rejected if it either
- fails to use standard terminology where appropriate, in a way that makes reading of the patent more difficult
- describes aspects of the invention which are minor or irrelevant but not novel in excessive and unnecessary detail, or
- is in any other obfuscated, in the opinion of the examiner.
The typical patent is a very long description using precise but completely non-standard terms. Patents spell out in detail things that a person in the field would use one or two words for, and as a result, patents are hard to read, hard to search and hard to judge. Bad patents slip through the cracks not because the patent examiners don't know what they're doing, but because the patents themselves are extremely difficult to read.
Fortunately, such things are not patentable. They would have if they could, and in fact, they pissed a lot of people off by trying to enforce a trademark on hit points. (They asked people to use "hits to kill" instead, which never caught on). They also sent takedown notices to various fan sites for fan-created but D&D-related content, and claimed copyright over some things that they'd obviously copied from mythology. TSR was everything that Slashdot loves to hate, and the hate contributed to their eventual demise.
In practice, quantum cryptography doesn't achieve anything that regular crypto systems like SSL or ipsec don't. Quantum cryptography is theoretically unbreakable, whereas SSL is believed but not mathematically proven to be unbreakable. In either case, it's easiest for an attacker to compromise one of the endpoints, so it's not a big difference. SSL is cheap, easy and widely deployed. So why would anyone spend $100,000+ per link on untested quantum cryptography hardware, when you could roll out ipsec much more cheaply?
Not true. Languages do lose distinctions over time, some *much* more significant than this one. However, we invent new ones at about the same rate. There is *always* a way to say what you want to say unambiguously. Worst case, you invent a phrase yourself, and if the language needs it, it will catch on.
It's very unlikely that someone would try to rig the vote for town mayor. But what if the machine were selectively droping votes for a specific senator or representative? Messing up the other questions on the ballot would be a side effect.
I'd say they were left off because collecting data on a country takes time and effort, and research projects like this one have limited budgets. There are a lot of countries that could've been included, but including all of them would require gathering a lot more data.
Actually, that quote /is/ in ADOM, though obviously as tribute. (To see it, become Doomed, then walk into a dark room.)
Provide a way to get a list of all the loaded extensions and plugins, and how much memory each is using. That will silence all the people who install memory-leaking extensions and complain that FF itself leaks memory, and also force the authors of those extensions to fix the leaks.
Well, sure, but what we care about is the average velocity over a reasonable period of time, which is very close to zero. Since velocity is a vector, we can just look at where the electron started and where it ended up; we don't care what path it took.
Sony decides that including both a motion sensor and a motor would add too much to the cost of an already-too-expensive console, and rumble is out of style anyways. (You don't want rumble in a wireless controller because it's bad for battery life, and the current trend is towards wireless). So rumble is cut from the feature list.
So Immersion Corporation, bitter that they didn't get the contract to design the PS3 controller and sensing an opportunity to gain press, responds by badmouthing Sony. Real professional.
'Pwned' may have started as a typo, but it's now a full-fledged word with a different meaning than 'owned'. Compare:
I owned that car. (That car used to be mine, before I sold it)
I pwned that car. (We were racing, and I left it way behind)
First there was the slang word "ownage", which means dominance, and is only loosely related to the verb "own". Once ownage was widely used, people started using it in other forms: own, owned, owning. These are spelled and pronounced the same as the non-slang verb to own, but are not the same word in people's minds. This sort of thing happens all the time in languages, and what tends to happen is that people look for a way to separate the two words. Then a few people started using "pwned" satirically (to say, "I'm using this word in the sense a person who can't type would use it"). Well, pwn (pronounced "pone") just so happens to be a syllable with no widespread meaning, which makes it prime real estate for a new word to form. So when a few people started using "pwned", it caught on quickly and replaced the slang meaning of "owned". Voila, a new word is born. In a few years its spelling will probably be normalized to "powned", and then it'll be here to stay.
So far, we've got posts bashing the slashdot article for not being current, bashing the Rolling Stone article for being by Rolling Stone, and a few posts of "it's not that bad, get over it". We remember the Florida 2000 fiasco, which was much ado about nothing, and assume this is the same.
It's not.
Seriously, read the article. This isn't just about a few dirty tricks, although there are plenty of those. It isn't about a few thousand votes, like Florida was. It's about outright, large-scale ballot stuffing, hundreds of thousands of votes, fraudulent manipulation of voter rolls, and deliberate sabotage by the Republican secretary of state (who was also the co-chair of President Bush's re-election committee).
It's an extraordinary claim, which does indeed require extraordinary evidence, but the evidence IS there. But no one's willing to look at the naked emperor. Everyone made up their mind about whether Bush was good or bad a long time ago, but now the Bush-supporters have no defense but to close their eyes and plug their ears. And for the most part, they're doing exactly that.
Static analysis tools like the one used to produce this list tend to produce lots of false positives, because they can't make as many assumptions as a programmer who knows what's going on, and they can't follow most interactions between different modules. So the headline should be "611 *possible* defects, 71 *possible* vulnerabilities" found. More likely, a small handful of those will turn out to be real (but minor) bugs, and the rest will be bogus.
No. Dumping is when you sell something at a loss. Selling something very cheaply, but still making a profit, is fair competition.
Some PC manufacturers skimp badly on RAM, even though it's cheap. Insufficient RAM is one of the few things that will make a modern computer perform badly as a desktop. By saying "Windows Vista requires 1GB RAM", Microsoft is really saying "manufacturers, stop giving users only 256MB!" Obviously Windows itself won't use 1GB of memory, but some applications will, and poor performance makes Microsoft (as well as the PC manufacturer) look bad.
As for the 128MB video card requirement, this is another area where PC manufacturers are overly stingy. Developers shouldn't have to worry about substandard integrated graphics chipsets, they should be able to program to a reasonable lowest common denominator. Microsoft wants to make sure no one is below that common denominator.
Basically, Microsoft is claiming as hardware requirements, not what Windows itself needs, but what they think programmers should be able to take for granted. It's all cheap hardware anyways, and it will only get cheaper in the future, so leaving some old systems unsupported is no big deal in the long run.
Obviously spelling code out punctuation with clumsy punctuation words won't do. This program cuts out some of the punctuation, but the real solution is to assign proper (single-syllable) abbreviations, in patterns which allow you to combine them into words wherever you'd want to. If you don't worry about sounding like English you can have a single syllable for every punctuation mark and editor command, plus syllables for "start transcribing string literal"-type commands. It would be easy to learn and you'd eventually learn to speak it like a fluent second language. Why say "is less than" like in the article when you could say "les"? You'd also have syllables for common editor commands, things like "transcribe string literal", and so on. Integrate it with autocomplete and it's as good as (maybe better than) typing.
Actually, I rather doubt that. The case against Microsoft lost steam when Bush entered office because the federal government was one of the parties in the case. But for AMD v Intel, there's really nothing the White House can do to influence the result.
The root problem is that patents are written so obtusely that neither examiners nor companies nor judges can really tell what they cover. The solution is to force companies to write their patents properly, by creating a penalty for using nonstandard terminology, fluff, etc. That would prevent lots of bad patents (they'd be more easily recognized), and reduce the mess the remainder make.
The report comes up with the $900 estimate by summing up cost estimates for each of the components, but its estimates for the prices of those components is overly pessimistic. In particular, it predicts that the Blu-Ray drive will cost $350 initially (!?), that the CPU will cost $230 initially, and that the unit will not be sold at a loss. They don't say how they arrived at those, but $350 for an optical drive in bulk is not believable at all. If Blu-Ray drives cost anywhere near that much, then the PS3 will ship without them. A more reasonable estimate is that the PS3 will cost $500 at launch, and come down to $300 quickly.
Unless you're ordering a hundred bazillion, you don't get custom chips made, you use mass-produced programmable chips. Making custom chips requires a hugely expensive setup process, so it's extremely unlikely to be cheaper or better in any way.