While it may be a BS patent, it's nice to see a large corporation get screwed by a patent for once
Don't be silly, large corporations don't get hurt by patents - sheesh.
Patents are for keeping out those pesky small innovative companies who can't affort to go to court and don't have their own patent portfolio so that they can force cross-licensing.
Here is some PHP code that will do something similar - it just encodes the IP address, but it does so much more efficiently - resulting in email addresses as short as "fwAAAQ@blah.com". The fwAAAQ can then be decoded using base64_decode to get back to the original IP address.
Don't reward them
on
My Visit to SCO
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I can't help thinking that as of this writing SCO has a market cap of around $130 million and Red Hat has nearly $300 million in cash and investments. Even at an inflated price, Red Hat could afford to buy SCO and free up Unix once and for all. Live the dream.
Do we really want to demonstrate that this form of cynical extortion, milking the altruism of the free software community, is a successful business strategy?
Please site a patent and claim number reading on every occurrence of use of a binary search; a bucket sort; an array in a computer program. Don't have the number on the tip of your tongue, or do you consider these not to be an "aspect of software development?" Or was that hyperbolae?
You probably mean "cite". Perhaps you could provide me with confirmation that IBM does not have a patent on any of the things you describe - if you can't, then neither can a software developer - which nicely illustrates the problem I am talking about.
Careful study of the web site discloses not a single instance of IBM going to a company with a hold-up. Nor does it evidence "US patents on virtually every trivial aspect of software development."
Oh really? You conducted a detailed and comprehensive study of the entire WWW? That is pretty amazing given that after 30 seconds with Google revealed this.
This is clearly hyperbolae. The parade of horribles didn't happen in the U.S., it is unlikely to happen in the E.U. The U.S. patent office finally rejects hundreds of applications in software arts every day, and will continue to do so.
You are trolling right? If not, WAKE UP!! There are US patents on virtually every trivial aspect of software development, to the extent that IBM can (and has) gone to companies and essentially said "you are probably violating one of our patents - pay up!". See here for some examples.
Nothing in the EU proposal permits (and the law actually precludes) the allowance of a patent claim, where the differences betweeen the claim and the prior art would be obvious to a person of ordinary skill in the art.
In theory, yes, but in practice the patent office is poorly motivated to deny patent claims, leaving it up to the courts to sort it out. Only the largest software companies then have the resources to fight it out in court, and typically the big guy wins just by virtue of stamina.
My MEP - Avril Doyle, email: adoyle[at]europarl.eu.int, responded within 24 hours to my email. On the down side, she was mainly saying that it wasn't really an area she knew much about and offering to refer me on to someone else.
Well, rather than waste your bytes on/., do as I did, go to Senator Hatch's website and send him a message complaining about his support for such an attrocity.
Unfortunately it is hard to believe that someone with such clear contempt for the Internet and its users would pay particularly close attention to email:-( Perhaps faxing him would be better (using one of those free email2fax gateways perhaps).
...Sen Hatch went on to propose that cars be designed so that they explode when they exceed the speed limit - or "pirate drive" as he preferred to call it.
I have been a software engineer for years and even I have no idea what is meant by "technical contribution" - and if you don't know what it is, how can anyone say what it isn't?
This is a wide-open door through which even the most rediculously obvious software patents could (and therefore will) slip.
Please please please don't let yourselves think that this is anything other than the EU getting a patent system open to virtually all of the abuses demonstrated in the US.
I just sent the following to my MEP, find your MEP's email address and contact them NOW before it is too late (people in the UK can find their members here)!:
Ms Doyle,
You may recall our recent discussion concerning the dangers of software patents for European innovation and competitiveness in software. Apparently, the Legal Affairs Committee has now recommended that patents on software are to be permitted within the EU - while only paying lip-service to the massive threat they present. This will be a collossal blow to smaller European software developers as they will be unable to compete with large US corporations in the patent land-grab which is sure to follow.
My question is - what problem are they attempting to fix? Software innovation has been just fine without software patents in Europe. The Linux computer operating system, which currently runs more web servers than Microsoft's Windows software, was developed by volunteers donating their time freely. This kind of effort is jeprodised when large software companies like Microsoft can use patents on trivial and obvious software processes to crush these altruistic development efforts, and Microsoft has stated that they are willing to do so.
It is insufficient to pay lip-service to the problem of patents on trivial and obvious techniques, I want to know how exactly this will be prevented. Certainly the lesson of the United States is that the patent office will be poorly motivated to deny patents on trivial software processes, leaving it up to the courts - a process that is much too costly and time-consuming for small companies in such a fast moving industry. I realise that you are not directly involved in this process, and I am not intimitely familiar with the internal workings of the European Parliament, but as the CEO of a software company with offices in Leinster I feel that you are the appropriate person to whom I should address my concerns.
If you could refer me to someone more appropriately positioned, I would be extremely grateful,
If I had a bunch of pain-in-the-ass investors who were likely to tear apart my presentation then I would try to keep them as-involved in the process as possible, rather than leaving so much to a single meeting where they can rip you to shreads.
Having had a number of investor meetings in my time, the PITA investor is rarely achieves anything useful other than making you feel like shit, and giving themselves an ego boost.
There is no excuse for bad manners in any setting, and in that context I would have probably told Jobs as much.
Perhaps it is just me, but this is one of the worst and least informative reviews of anything I have read in a long time.
He starts out mumbling something about fonts, then goes into an unintelligable discussion of "menus". Apparently Red Carpet looks "cool" - very informative, thanks.
I learned more about this product by spending 20 seconds on the ximian.com website than by reading this entire "review".
Are the/. editors even bothering to read these stories before they post them these days?
Freenet has no way for content to "progress". When I read Bob's Freesite, I have no idea whether Bob has changed his mind in the meantime and posted another site. Yes, Freenet has MSK's or MBR's or DBR's (can't remember which right now) but those require constant attention, or a 24/7 connection and a cron job.
Wrong - Edition based freesites achieve exactly what you describe.
Email over freenet requires guessing the right key to insert based on what keys you think have already been inserted, and then guessing which keys to retrieve, based on (essentially) brute force.
It requires exponential probing and works fine in practice.
Anyway, forgive the opportunism, but this is reasonably on-topic. Last weekend I set myself the ambitious task of improving on Google. I came up with a Google front-end which allows you to give feedback on the quality of search results, and thus refine your search. I could really use people's help to test it out - you can find it here. Feedback would really be appreciated.
I am seriously worried that we are seeing the start of an innovation dark-age where true innovation becomes virtually impossible without paying the "patent tax" to the lawyers and IBMs of the world.
Something similar is already happening in healthcare - doctors cannot afford to do their job while paying the "lawyer tax" to protect themselves against being sued for malpractice. If a powerful lobby like healthcare can't fight the lawyers - what hope do a bunch of geeks have when their beef is even less-easily articulated to the general public?
The patent system is rapidly achieving the exact opposite of what it is intended to achieve. It is providing strong disincentives to true innovation while lining the pockets of those whose only innovative ideas consist of new ways to exploit the patent system.
The solution? I propose a non-profit organization to which patents can be donated, which will use those patents to defend anyone sued for infringement of a software patent. email me if you are interested in helping me to make it happen.
It seems that the second patent was also filed in 1999 so Freenet's CHK might not constitute prior-art after all, however suitable prior art isn't hard to find, for example - 5 minutes of searching revealed this 1997 paper.
The company is looking to a new patent license for one new revenue source. It has acquired rights to a 1999 patent that Bermeister says covers the technique of identifying files on peer-to-peer networks using a "hash," or digital fingerprint based on the contents of the file. The company will approach virtually all other peer-to-peer services to seek license rights, Bermeister said.
Good luck to them - the actual 1999 patent is invalidated by the hashtable datastructure which has been around for decades, and their 2002 patent is clearly nullified by the Content Hash Key first introduced in Freenet in 2001 (and I am sure earlier prior art exists too but Freenet, being a P2P network, is more on-point).
In a recent NPR interview Powell responded to the fact that Clear Channel had taken over radio by saying "Yes, Clear Channel is a problem, but there is only one such company". I mean, that is like saying "Sure, Microsoft is a problem but at least there is only one of them"! Of course there is only one of them, they are a bloody monopoly!.
These neo-Conservatives work on the belief that an unrestricted market will be the cure for all ills, yet the closer we get to this situation - the worse everything is! A market that relies on a government enforced artificial monopoly will never be unrestricted. If they really wanted the airwaves to be an unrestricted market, they should let anyone broadcast without restriction.
We tend to make plenty of money (though this trend is reduced now) and low-cost health insurance is available to those who do not abuse themselves by, say, smoking cigarettes, or drinking frequently.
Oh? Try getting AIDS - and finding out just how difficult it is to get the drugs you need in what is supposed to be the world's wealthiest country.
Oh, sorry - I forgot, in America those that get AIDS deserve it for being God-hating fags. Welcome to the new world order.
US at its worst, it better than Europe at its best.
Yeah, if your entire measurement of a nation's success is the unemployment rate. Tell that to the 50 million Americans without healthcare (many of whom are employed). Tell that to the numerous people I know who work hard for eight hours a day and are still worse off than an unemployed European. Tell that to the well-off Americans who pay taxes comparable to those in Europe, but whose money is spent on taking lives rather than saving and improving them.
Slashdot Mirror
Patents are for keeping out those pesky small innovative companies who can't affort to go to court and don't have their own patent portfolio so that they can force cross-licensing.
because I was focusing on getting the output smaller - if you want to rewrite it to make it more efficient internally, then be my guest.
Sorry Slashdotters - the Simpsons were making fun of people just like you!
My MEP - Avril Doyle, email: adoyle[at]europarl.eu.int, responded within 24 hours to my email. On the down side, she was mainly saying that it wasn't really an area she knew much about and offering to refer me on to someone else.
...Sen Hatch went on to propose that cars be designed so that they explode when they exceed the speed limit - or "pirate drive" as he preferred to call it.
This is a wide-open door through which even the most rediculously obvious software patents could (and therefore will) slip.
Please please please don't let yourselves think that this is anything other than the EU getting a patent system open to virtually all of the abuses demonstrated in the US.
I just sent the following to my MEP, find your MEP's email address and contact them NOW before it is too late (people in the UK can find their members here)!:
Having had a number of investor meetings in my time, the PITA investor is rarely achieves anything useful other than making you feel like shit, and giving themselves an ego boost.
There is no excuse for bad manners in any setting, and in that context I would have probably told Jobs as much.
I learned more about this product by spending 20 seconds on the ximian.com website than by reading this entire "review". Are the /. editors even bothering to read these stories before they post them these days?
Your feedback is local to your search, it doesn't affect other people's searches.
...it isn't on a fat pipe, so please understand if its slow.
Anyway, forgive the opportunism, but this is reasonably on-topic. Last weekend I set myself the ambitious task of improving on Google. I came up with a Google front-end which allows you to give feedback on the quality of search results, and thus refine your search. I could really use people's help to test it out - you can find it here. Feedback would really be appreciated.
Something similar is already happening in healthcare - doctors cannot afford to do their job while paying the "lawyer tax" to protect themselves against being sued for malpractice. If a powerful lobby like healthcare can't fight the lawyers - what hope do a bunch of geeks have when their beef is even less-easily articulated to the general public?
The patent system is rapidly achieving the exact opposite of what it is intended to achieve. It is providing strong disincentives to true innovation while lining the pockets of those whose only innovative ideas consist of new ways to exploit the patent system.
The solution? I propose a non-profit organization to which patents can be donated, which will use those patents to defend anyone sued for infringement of a software patent. email me if you are interested in helping me to make it happen.
It seems that the second patent was also filed in 1999 so Freenet's CHK might not constitute prior-art after all, however suitable prior art isn't hard to find, for example - 5 minutes of searching revealed this 1997 paper.
These neo-Conservatives work on the belief that an unrestricted market will be the cure for all ills, yet the closer we get to this situation - the worse everything is! A market that relies on a government enforced artificial monopoly will never be unrestricted. If they really wanted the airwaves to be an unrestricted market, they should let anyone broadcast without restriction.
Oh, sorry - I forgot, in America those that get AIDS deserve it for being God-hating fags. Welcome to the new world order.