But plenty of other browsers are supported on those systems. I don't know of any system that's forced to use IE6 for technical reasons. Usually, it's political (i.e. management doesn't want to replace in-house apps that are IE6-only). I think IE6 can definitely be considered on-the-bubble on the open Internet. The cost of supporting it is steadily increasing and the potential benefits shrinking.
Yeah, even W3Schools, which is aimed at web developers, and thus is notorious for having high non-IE users, still has 33% IE. Of course, their IE6 numbers are down to 7%, still more than Safari and Opera combined, but only half the size of Chrome.
I could see a strong case for dropping IE6 support, as its numbers are steadily dropping, and it's not supported upstream, and it is disproportionately difficult to support (to put it mildly), but no IE support in general is an idea for hobbyists and the most niche of sites only.
Actually, for a _human_, getting energy from a human isn't a half-bad idea. As someone once said, "wherever you go, there you are." You may not have plugs, you may not have batteries, but there's a very high chance that you have a you. On the other hand, the idea of planting other people and using them as batteries is so stupid that I was almost unable to keep watching the movie at that point.
No, there is nothing mathematical about, e.g. the binding properties of electrons. We can describe physics using mathematics, but you can't confirm a physical experiment with pencil and paper. You can with mathematics and with software (although it make take millions of years in the latter case).
Bilski as a whole greatly improved matters in the US. It's true that the SC didn't go quite as far as the lower court, but the lower court decision wasn't binding on other districts, while the SC decision is. Even East Texas. Anyway, the net result was still a major improvement. And the test (machine-or-transformation) wasn't rejected; it was simply stated to be not-necessarily-sufficient by itself. But the bar for any candidate patent that fails the machine-or-transformation test is much, much higher than it was. The State Street test is dead. The Bilski test survived, although it was mildly wounded.
Pre-Bilski business/software patents are still going to come under a lot more scrutiny than they did before.
Or to put it another way, the answer to your last question is: since (some) business method patents are "still potentially valid", as you yourself admitted (emphasis mine), it's not a case of "paving the way"-- it's a case of "failing to block the way as much as we might have hoped." The only way it could have been "paving the way" is if it made more patents possible--but it did just the opposite.
Same for Mathematics yet they're unpatentable *and* uncopyrightable. Yet innovation goes on.
Mathematical principles are facts that are discovered, they are not analogous to software
You mean aside from the fact that all software is, provably, mathematics?
(Actually, there are exceptions in the case of hardware/software combinations, like motion control, but the point is that those aren't pure software. Pure software is always purely mathematical.)
"Meanwhile"? Unless you've got a very broad definition of that word, I think I have to disagree. Business method patents came in with State Street back in '98. And while this year's SC decision in Bilski didn't go as far as many (including me) might have hoped, it did actually cut back quite a bit on what's patentable. See, for example, this Groklaw article on a post-Bilsk software patent rejection.
I think a better statement might be, "meanwhile, in the US, the way for business method patents has been only partially blocked."
I'm a little surprised that nobody has mentioned Freeciv.net. It's a freeciv (.org) client that runs on a web server, and communicates with the user's browser using HTML5 elements like canvas.
Seems reasonable to me. These people complained about privacy, so the ESRB removed their privacy. Isn't that what they wanted? Wait, you want me to do what, now? RTF...huh?:)
Hey, nice simple solutions to biological problems never have unintended side effects! Anyway, the human genome, and all possible interactions of all its parts is so well-known and thoroughly studied that I'm sure there's no room for error. Trust me, I'm a politician with little or no knowledge of genetics or biology!:)
The second comment under the article seems to be a pretty serious debunking. I'm not going to take sides or tell you who's right and wrong because I don't know, but I will note that arXiv (the source for the claims) is for pre-prints and is not peer-reviewed.
For some extra irony: at the moment I'm typing this, the latest story on the front page is about the iPhone, and it's in the Mobile section, not the Apple section!
So apparently a story about Android is about Apple, but a story about iPhone isn't. *sigh*
Yes, the SYSV ELF interface was published and promoted by the Santa Cruz Operation (not The SCO Group) for use in other operating systems, see the Declaration of Ulrich Drepper (PDF) in the SCO v IBM case. OldSCO talked Red Hat into adding Elf code to Linux, now NewSCO wants to sue because it's there.
The truth is that code was reused (if not copied, exactly, in the same way you don't submit a copied essay which you've taken from a classmate) from a UNIX derivative, which is now (somewhat disputably) owned by SCO.
The truth is that SCO does not own the copyrights to UNIX code, as ruled by a judge, a jury and a second judge in Utah.
Beyond that, SCO already turned over all their evidence to IBM several years ago, where it was analyzed by an expert named Dr. Brian W. Kernighan (if the name doesn't ring a bell, you're not qualifed to be commenting on this topic), and he examined the comparisons and came to the conclusion that no illegal copying had taken place. Note, that's not "no copying", but "no illegal copying". UNIX is based on a number of sources. Most famously, they stole (and I use that word advisedly, since they removed copyright notices, which was illegal) from BSD. They also contributed parts of UNIX to public standards, including the ELF standard which is one of the examples shown here.
The problem is that you seem to think there's a single copyright to UNIX. There isn't. The three biggest stakeholders are Novell (inherited from AT&T), the University of Cal. regents (all the BSD code in UNIX), and Sun, but IBM and SGI also own largish chunks. The people you're accusing of being "lazy and careless" actually own parts of the code you're claiming they illegally copied. Do you know who actually owns the parts in question? I don't, but no evidence of illegal copying has been shown in court!
Releasing this thoroughly debunked information at this late date can only be a desperate attempt to spread FUD. Don't fall for it. I'm sorry that you once had your code plagiarized, but this case is nothing like yours.
Betamax died because it couldn't record the two hour long "NBC Saturday Night at the Movies".
That's what people claim now (and it may even have been a factor for some purchasers), but as someone who lived during the heyday of Beta, I assure you that I had no idea it was limited to 1hr, and that fact was not even a factor in my decision to go with VHS. VHS was cheap, it was "good enough" and it had multi-vendor support so there was actual competition in the market, so it was noticably cheaper, and as a result of all the previous, these new things called "video stores" which were just starting to appear carried more VHS than Beta.
I feel like I should be saying something about lawns here, but advancing senility is making it hard to remember the exact quote.:)
There are no android phones older than the one I have (and I use the gmail app, not pop or imap), and if it's "an Exchange thing", shouldn't they be suing Microsoft rather than Google?
RIM were and are jerks, no arguments there. But I think our points of agreement begin and end there. As far as I know, being a jerk is not in itself a tort (although many things jerks do are). No matter how big of jerks they are, they don't deserve to be punished for doing something that's not wrong. So the question of whether the patent is valid is critical, even though there were jerks on both sides of RIM v NTP.
As for your comment that the price to consumers is negligible, I disagree. The damage in rewarding patent trolls is not just in the monetary costs, but in the dangerous precedent it sets. To quote Kipling:
"It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation, To puff and look important and to say: "Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you. We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld; But we've proved it again and again, That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld You never get rid of the Dane."
As for the question of whether the patent is valid? It's simple. Email relies on TCP/IP, a protocol that is independent of the means of transmission. Copper, fiber, radio, avian carrier", it doesn't matter. NTP clearly doesn't have a patent on wireless TCP/IP, and once you have wireless TCP/IP, all TCP- or UDP-based protocols come along for free. HTTP, SMTP, NTP (the protocol, not the company), NNTP, SNMP, etc., etc., etc.--none of them depend on or are affected by the physical medium used to transmit TCP/IP packets.
As for why RIM didn't win, I don't know, but as you point out, their courtroom shenanigans surely didn't help, and may have pre-empted any proper re-examination of the patents. But more importantly, that was pre-Bilski, and while the final SCOTUS decision on that may have stopped short of what many of us wanted, it did leave the bar for patents set a whole lot higher than it had been.
I don't know about some of the other players, but with Google at least, the patent almost has to fail the "machine-or-transformation" test. It's not the machine, because I can download the Android SDK to my desktop, and run Android apps there just fine, even though that's a totally different (and totally different type of) machine. And my machine is wired, so I'm not infringing their patent when I run the application under the SDK--so why is it suddenly infringing when I transfer the software unchanged (nothing is "transformed") to my phone? And if it's infringing on my phone for some inconceivable reason, is it infringing on my laptop the moment I remove the cat5 and it (automatically and transparently) switches to WiFi? I'm sorry, but "does not compute" is the only phrase that comes to mind.
You have six TV devices? How many rooms are you in at one time?
Yes, a house can never have more than one person living in it at a time. And even if there were to be more than one person living in a house (which would never happen), all those people would always want to watch exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.
Churches do more than preach superstition. They often offer drug counceling, battered women shelters, etc.
Some do, sure. In which case, wouldn't it make more sense to offer tax breaks for groups (not just churches) that offer "drug couceling [sic], battered women shelters, etc.", rather than just giving all churches a free ride because some do some good works?
But that doesn't mean it wasn't one. "[T]he first computer ever sold as 'PC' was the Apple ][" may be true, but, "[t]he PC was invented by Apple" is not.
Homer may not have called himself a poet (since he didn't speak English), but that doesn't mean he wasn't one.
Furthermore, the statement, "based on the ideas incorporated in the Apple ][ like the extensibility with cards that fit in a standardized port", while technically true, seems deliberately misleading, since the S-100 bus predates the Apple II (or I).
Copyright isn't some inalienable right possessed by creators of works. It's a limited right granted by the government for a (supposedly) limited period of time.
That's the US view. The rest of the western world has a slightly different view, wherein copyright is acknowledging the "moral right" of the creator to control his or her own work. This is why you often see in books from Europe, statements like, "the moral right of the author has been asserted." Furthermore, the US is signatory to the Berne Convention, which means that the US government has as least implicitly accepted the notion of the moral rights of foreign authors, even if US authors and creators still lack this acceptance.
As recently as the 1960s, the US was widely regarded as a renegade with respect to copyrights, much the way China is today. See, for example, the debacle of the first US publication of the Lord of the Rings.
Though I'm an American, I actually think the idea of an inherent moral right behind copyright is a good one. That said, rights aren't necessarily unlimited. My right to breathe doesn't mean I can put a plastic bag over the head of everyone around me to prevent them from using "my" air. So I also support the idea of copyright reform and rolling back the length of copyright protection to benefit the public interest. The effectively unlimited copyright extensions we're seeing are strangling culture much like those plastic bags I mentioned.:)
There are some others, e.g. Leverage with Timothy Hutton and Gina Bellman (of Coupling fame) has had as-they-were-aired availability on Netflix, and I've seen a couple of others. But it's definitely rare compared to the only-stream-older-seasons or only-on-DVD shows.
Slashdot Mirror
But plenty of other browsers are supported on those systems. I don't know of any system that's forced to use IE6 for technical reasons. Usually, it's political (i.e. management doesn't want to replace in-house apps that are IE6-only). I think IE6 can definitely be considered on-the-bubble on the open Internet. The cost of supporting it is steadily increasing and the potential benefits shrinking.
Yeah, even W3Schools, which is aimed at web developers, and thus is notorious for having high non-IE users, still has 33% IE. Of course, their IE6 numbers are down to 7%, still more than Safari and Opera combined, but only half the size of Chrome.
I could see a strong case for dropping IE6 support, as its numbers are steadily dropping, and it's not supported upstream, and it is disproportionately difficult to support (to put it mildly), but no IE support in general is an idea for hobbyists and the most niche of sites only.
No one else seems to have said it, so I guess it's up to me.
The Turtle Moves!
Actually, for a _human_, getting energy from a human isn't a half-bad idea. As someone once said, "wherever you go, there you are." You may not have plugs, you may not have batteries, but there's a very high chance that you have a you. On the other hand, the idea of planting other people and using them as batteries is so stupid that I was almost unable to keep watching the movie at that point.
No, there is nothing mathematical about, e.g. the binding properties of electrons. We can describe physics using mathematics, but you can't confirm a physical experiment with pencil and paper. You can with mathematics and with software (although it make take millions of years in the latter case).
Bilski as a whole greatly improved matters in the US. It's true that the SC didn't go quite as far as the lower court, but the lower court decision wasn't binding on other districts, while the SC decision is. Even East Texas. Anyway, the net result was still a major improvement. And the test (machine-or-transformation) wasn't rejected; it was simply stated to be not-necessarily-sufficient by itself. But the bar for any candidate patent that fails the machine-or-transformation test is much, much higher than it was. The State Street test is dead. The Bilski test survived, although it was mildly wounded.
Pre-Bilski business/software patents are still going to come under a lot more scrutiny than they did before.
Or to put it another way, the answer to your last question is: since (some) business method patents are "still potentially valid", as you yourself admitted (emphasis mine), it's not a case of "paving the way"-- it's a case of "failing to block the way as much as we might have hoped." The only way it could have been "paving the way" is if it made more patents possible--but it did just the opposite.
Same for Mathematics yet they're unpatentable *and* uncopyrightable. Yet innovation goes on.
Mathematical principles are facts that are discovered, they are not analogous to software
You mean aside from the fact that all software is, provably, mathematics?
(Actually, there are exceptions in the case of hardware/software combinations, like motion control, but the point is that those aren't pure software. Pure software is always purely mathematical.)
"Meanwhile"? Unless you've got a very broad definition of that word, I think I have to disagree. Business method patents came in with State Street back in '98. And while this year's SC decision in Bilski didn't go as far as many (including me) might have hoped, it did actually cut back quite a bit on what's patentable. See, for example, this Groklaw article on a post-Bilsk software patent rejection.
I think a better statement might be, "meanwhile, in the US, the way for business method patents has been only partially blocked."
I'm a little surprised that nobody has mentioned Freeciv.net. It's a freeciv (.org) client that runs on a web server, and communicates with the user's browser using HTML5 elements like canvas.
Seems reasonable to me. These people complained about privacy, so the ESRB removed their privacy. Isn't that what they wanted? Wait, you want me to do what, now? RTF...huh? :)
Hey, nice simple solutions to biological problems never have unintended side effects! Anyway, the human genome, and all possible interactions of all its parts is so well-known and thoroughly studied that I'm sure there's no room for error. Trust me, I'm a politician with little or no knowledge of genetics or biology! :)
The second comment under the article seems to be a pretty serious debunking. I'm not going to take sides or tell you who's right and wrong because I don't know, but I will note that arXiv (the source for the claims) is for pre-prints and is not peer-reviewed.
For some extra irony: at the moment I'm typing this, the latest story on the front page is about the iPhone, and it's in the Mobile section, not the Apple section!
So apparently a story about Android is about Apple, but a story about iPhone isn't. *sigh*
Yes, the SYSV ELF interface was published and promoted by the Santa Cruz Operation (not The SCO Group) for use in other operating systems, see the Declaration of Ulrich Drepper (PDF) in the SCO v IBM case. OldSCO talked Red Hat into adding Elf code to Linux, now NewSCO wants to sue because it's there.
The truth is that code was reused (if not copied, exactly, in the same way you don't submit a copied essay which you've taken from a classmate) from a UNIX derivative, which is now (somewhat disputably) owned by SCO.
The truth is that SCO does not own the copyrights to UNIX code, as ruled by a judge, a jury and a second judge in Utah.
Beyond that, SCO already turned over all their evidence to IBM several years ago, where it was analyzed by an expert named Dr. Brian W. Kernighan (if the name doesn't ring a bell, you're not qualifed to be commenting on this topic), and he examined the comparisons and came to the conclusion that no illegal copying had taken place. Note, that's not "no copying", but "no illegal copying". UNIX is based on a number of sources. Most famously, they stole (and I use that word advisedly, since they removed copyright notices, which was illegal) from BSD. They also contributed parts of UNIX to public standards, including the ELF standard which is one of the examples shown here.
The problem is that you seem to think there's a single copyright to UNIX. There isn't. The three biggest stakeholders are Novell (inherited from AT&T), the University of Cal. regents (all the BSD code in UNIX), and Sun, but IBM and SGI also own largish chunks. The people you're accusing of being "lazy and careless" actually own parts of the code you're claiming they illegally copied. Do you know who actually owns the parts in question? I don't, but no evidence of illegal copying has been shown in court!
Releasing this thoroughly debunked information at this late date can only be a desperate attempt to spread FUD. Don't fall for it. I'm sorry that you once had your code plagiarized, but this case is nothing like yours.
Betamax died because it couldn't record the two hour long "NBC Saturday Night at the Movies".
That's what people claim now (and it may even have been a factor for some purchasers), but as someone who lived during the heyday of Beta, I assure you that I had no idea it was limited to 1hr, and that fact was not even a factor in my decision to go with VHS. VHS was cheap, it was "good enough" and it had multi-vendor support so there was actual competition in the market, so it was noticably cheaper, and as a result of all the previous, these new things called "video stores" which were just starting to appear carried more VHS than Beta.
I feel like I should be saying something about lawns here, but advancing senility is making it hard to remember the exact quote. :)
I'm pretty sure he was confirming what you said, not contradicting it, and pointing to VoIP as the specific reason why they matched your scenario.
You should re-read the final sentence of that "verbiage", though, as it's a excellent point, IMO.
There are no android phones older than the one I have (and I use the gmail app, not pop or imap), and if it's "an Exchange thing", shouldn't they be suing Microsoft rather than Google?
RIM were and are jerks, no arguments there. But I think our points of agreement begin and end there. As far as I know, being a jerk is not in itself a tort (although many things jerks do are). No matter how big of jerks they are, they don't deserve to be punished for doing something that's not wrong. So the question of whether the patent is valid is critical, even though there were jerks on both sides of RIM v NTP.
As for your comment that the price to consumers is negligible, I disagree. The damage in rewarding patent trolls is not just in the monetary costs, but in the dangerous precedent it sets. To quote Kipling:
"It is always a temptation to a rich and lazy nation,
To puff and look important and to say:
"Though we know we should defeat you, we have not the time to meet you.
We will therefore pay you cash to go away."
And that is called paying the Dane-geld;
But we've proved it again and again,
That if once you have paid him the Dane-geld
You never get rid of the Dane."
As for the question of whether the patent is valid? It's simple. Email relies on TCP/IP, a protocol that is independent of the means of transmission. Copper, fiber, radio, avian carrier", it doesn't matter. NTP clearly doesn't have a patent on wireless TCP/IP, and once you have wireless TCP/IP, all TCP- or UDP-based protocols come along for free. HTTP, SMTP, NTP (the protocol, not the company), NNTP, SNMP, etc., etc., etc.--none of them depend on or are affected by the physical medium used to transmit TCP/IP packets.
As for why RIM didn't win, I don't know, but as you point out, their courtroom shenanigans surely didn't help, and may have pre-empted any proper re-examination of the patents. But more importantly, that was pre-Bilski, and while the final SCOTUS decision on that may have stopped short of what many of us wanted, it did leave the bar for patents set a whole lot higher than it had been.
I don't know about some of the other players, but with Google at least, the patent almost has to fail the "machine-or-transformation" test. It's not the machine, because I can download the Android SDK to my desktop, and run Android apps there just fine, even though that's a totally different (and totally different type of) machine. And my machine is wired, so I'm not infringing their patent when I run the application under the SDK--so why is it suddenly infringing when I transfer the software unchanged (nothing is "transformed") to my phone? And if it's infringing on my phone for some inconceivable reason, is it infringing on my laptop the moment I remove the cat5 and it (automatically and transparently) switches to WiFi? I'm sorry, but "does not compute" is the only phrase that comes to mind.
Then why is Google on the list? I have an Android phone, and I assure you it doesn't use push for the email.
You have six TV devices? How many rooms are you in at one time?
Yes, a house can never have more than one person living in it at a time. And even if there were to be more than one person living in a house (which would never happen), all those people would always want to watch exactly the same thing at exactly the same time.
Churches do more than preach superstition. They often offer drug counceling, battered women shelters, etc.
Some do, sure. In which case, wouldn't it make more sense to offer tax breaks for groups (not just churches) that offer "drug couceling [sic], battered women shelters, etc.", rather than just giving all churches a free ride because some do some good works?
The Altair never sold as "PC".
But that doesn't mean it wasn't one. "[T]he first computer ever sold as 'PC' was the Apple ][" may be true, but, "[t]he PC was invented by Apple" is not.
Homer may not have called himself a poet (since he didn't speak English), but that doesn't mean he wasn't one.
Furthermore, the statement, "based on the ideas incorporated in the Apple ][ like the extensibility with cards that fit in a standardized port", while technically true, seems deliberately misleading, since the S-100 bus predates the Apple II (or I).
Copyright isn't some inalienable right possessed by creators of works. It's a limited right granted by the government for a (supposedly) limited period of time.
That's the US view. The rest of the western world has a slightly different view, wherein copyright is acknowledging the "moral right" of the creator to control his or her own work. This is why you often see in books from Europe, statements like, "the moral right of the author has been asserted." Furthermore, the US is signatory to the Berne Convention, which means that the US government has as least implicitly accepted the notion of the moral rights of foreign authors, even if US authors and creators still lack this acceptance.
As recently as the 1960s, the US was widely regarded as a renegade with respect to copyrights, much the way China is today. See, for example, the debacle of the first US publication of the Lord of the Rings.
Though I'm an American, I actually think the idea of an inherent moral right behind copyright is a good one. That said, rights aren't necessarily unlimited. My right to breathe doesn't mean I can put a plastic bag over the head of everyone around me to prevent them from using "my" air. So I also support the idea of copyright reform and rolling back the length of copyright protection to benefit the public interest. The effectively unlimited copyright extensions we're seeing are strangling culture much like those plastic bags I mentioned. :)
There are some others, e.g. Leverage with Timothy Hutton and Gina Bellman (of Coupling fame) has had as-they-were-aired availability on Netflix, and I've seen a couple of others. But it's definitely rare compared to the only-stream-older-seasons or only-on-DVD shows.